The best-known manually created body of commonsense knowledge is the Cyc or ResearchCyc knowledge base (KB) (Lenat 1995). This contains an ontology of a few hundred thousand concepts and several million facts and rules, backed up by an inference engine. It has been applied to analysis, decision support and other types of projects in business, education and military domains. However, the Cyc ontology and KB contents have been motivated primarily by knowledge engineering considerations (often for specific projects) rather than by application to language understanding, and this is reflected in its heavy reliance on  very specific predicates expressed as concatenations of English words, and on higher-order operators. For example, the relation between killing and dying is expressed using the predicates lastSubEvents, KillingByOrganism-Unique, and Dying, and relies on a higher-order relation relationAllExists that can be expanded into a quantified conditional statement. This remoteness from language makes it difficult to apply the Cyc KB to language understanding, especially if the goal is to extract relevant concepts and axioms from this KB and integrate them with concepts and axioms formalized in a more linguistically oriented representation (as opposed to adopting the CycL language, Cyc KB, axioms about English, and inference mechanisms wholesale) (e.g., Conesa et al. 2010).