{"id":1456,"date":"2026-07-16T16:42:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T15:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/?page_id=1456"},"modified":"2026-07-16T16:42:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T15:42:56","slug":"all-you-can-eat-ontology-building-feeding-wikipedia-to-cyc","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/all-you-can-eat-ontology-building-feeding-wikipedia-to-cyc\/","title":{"rendered":"All You Can Eat Ontology-Building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Dr<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dr Catherine Legg – Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand
This event took place on Wednesday 22 April 2009 at 11:30<\/small><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to achieve a genuinely intelligent World Wide Web, it seems that building some kind of general machine-readable ontology is an inescapable task. Yet the past 20 years have shown that hand-coding formal ontologies is not practicable. A recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology-building (e.g. YAGO, DBpedia), but here quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. I suggest that the long-running Cyc project can finally come into its own here, describing methods developed at the University of Waikato over the past summer whereby 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia were added to appropriate Cyc collections, and automatically categorized as instances or subcollections. Most importantly, Cyc itself was leveraged for ontological quality control by \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfeeding\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 assertions to it one by one, allowing it to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcregurgitate\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 those that are ontologically unsound. Cyc is arguably the only ontology currently sophisticated enough to be able to perform such a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdigestive\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 function, using its principled taxonomic structure and purpose-built inference engine. It is suggested that a traditional fixation of AI researchers on realizing the intelligence of the brain has perhaps caused us to overlook more humble yet genuine steps towards the AI vision which might be gained by realizing the intelligence of the stomach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We are also inviting top experts in AI and Knowledge Technologies to discuss major socio-technological topics with an audience that comprises both members of the Knowledge Media Institute, as well as the wider staff at The Open University. Differently from our seminar series, these events follow a Q&A format.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Catherine Legg – Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Waikato, New ZealandThis event took place on Wednesday 22 April 2009 at 11:30 In order to achieve a genuinely intelligent World Wide Web, it seems that building some kind of general machine-readable ontology is an inescapable task. Yet the past 20 years have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"unity_related_person":[],"unity_sdg":[],"unity_research_theme":[],"unity_strategic_priority":[],"unity_enabler":[],"unity_general_category":[],"unity_stem_unit":[],"unity_related_project":[],"unity_related_archived_project":[],"unity_related_event":[],"class_list":["post-1456","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1457,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1456\/revisions\/1457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"unity_related_person","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_related_person?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_sdg","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_sdg?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_research_theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_research_theme?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_strategic_priority","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_strategic_priority?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_enabler","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_enabler?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_general_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_general_category?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_stem_unit","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_stem_unit?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_related_project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_related_project?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_related_archived_project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_related_archived_project?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"unity_related_event","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/unity_related_event?post=1456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}