The triumph of generic databases The computerization of
commonsense knowledge goes back at least to Ross Quillian’s
paper from the 1969 book Semantic Information Processing. Ross
used methods that aren’t that different from what I use today,
but he was able to store just a few hundred concepts in his
computer. The Cyc project, starting in the 1980s contained about
3 million facts. It was successful on it’s own terms, but it
didn’t lead to the revolution in natural language processing
that it promised. WordNet, from the same era, documents about
120,000 word senses, but like Cyc, hasn’t had a large
engineering impact. DBpedia and Freebase have become popular
lately, I think because they’re a lot like traditional databases
in character. For a person, place or creative work you’ve got
the information necessary to make a ‘Pokemon card’ about the
topic. With languages like SPARQL and MQL it’s possible to write
queries you’d write in a relational database, so people have an
idea what to do with it. DBpedia and Free