<p>I thought these guys sounded familiar so I did some poking
around. Yep, I've heard of them before. They're the real deal.
Their founder is famous in AI circles as one of the top luminaries
in the field. They are very well funded, and have been very well
funded for years. (And BTW, according to the project update in
SourceForge, OpenCyc 0.9B is supposed to be released by
10/12.)</p>
<p>It's very easy to get pie-in-the-sky with these sorts of things
so I'm going to list only those ideas that I'm guessing wouldn't
be outrageously difficult to implement (assuming OpenCyc
works as advertized).</p>
<ol>
<li>Enhance the OpenACS search results page by grouping the
results into folders, similar to the way NorthernLight.com does.
(This might actually be a good pilot project for
OpenACS/OpenCyc integration.)</li>
<li>Shovel a huge amount of pre-existing content (Word files,
PDFs, static web pages, etc.) into an OpenACS system and have
OpenCyc generate one or more category trees for it. Then
generate a Yahoo!-style content directory. This would be
enornously useful for medium to large-sized organizations that
generate a lot of content that doesn't get re-used because
people who don't know it exists already have no way of finding
it.</li>
<li>Shovel all of the content (bboard posts, documents in
file-storage, SDM entries, etc.) created by one person into
OpenCyc and produce a ranked list of categories in which this
person seems interested. Show that ranked list, along with links
to the content items in each category, on the person's profile
page. (This could be hidden at the user's option.) So, for
example, you could see that Jane Doe has posted a lot of stuff
about caching to the OpenACS.org site, and you could
immediately drill down to those particular posts to see if she's
the expert you're looking for. Alternatively, you could allow
somebody to search the directory based on keywords to find all
the people who have posted stuff about caching, in rank
order.</li>
<li>Building on the idea above, whenever the person's interest
level score passes a threshold on a particular topic, have the
system ask the person if s/he wants to receive email alerts when
new content items within that category are entered into the
system.</li>
</ol>
<p>Yeah. This could be interesting.</p>
