OpenCyc sounds great, but as Michael stated:
"many (including me, to a certain extent) are still having trouble visualizing the benefits of this system in concrete terms"
We are working in the KM-arena with a focus on German students and academics and everything that makes knowledge more tangible would definitely be valueable.
It looks like OpenCyc is very closely connected to the English language though. How valueable would it be for other languages?
"Q: What can one use OpenCyc to do?
...speech understanding (using the KB to prune implausible choices vis common sense, discourse context, and prosodics),
database integration (using the KB as an interlingua through which semantic joins occur automatically via back chaining) and consistency-checking,
rapid development of an ontology in a vertical area (by extending and growing the OpenCyc KB in that area, using the OpenCyc Rapid Theory Formation toolkit)..."
I checked out the opencyc.org site and found out about the license under which OpenCyc will be released. We should have had a glance on it, when we integrate OpenCyc into OpenACS...
"Yes, OpenCyc may be freely copied, distributed and used for commercial or non-commercial purposes according to the terms of the OpenCyc license, which is similar to the GNU Library or ÂLesser Public License (LGPL). Qualified parties can obtain a free license to a substantially larger subset of the Cyc Knowledge Base known as ResearchCyc, which is for R&D use only. The complete Cyc Knowledge Base can be licensed from Cycorp, Inc. for commercial use. Terms for licensing the complete Cyc KB are negotiated on an individual basis. Year by year, each assertion in the latest version of Cyc will migrate to a subsequent release of ResearchCyc, and each assertion in ResearchCyc will migrate to a later release of OpenCyc."
