The original goal of the project was ambitious – encode all human knowledge in a format that a machine could process and use for reasoning (see artificial intelligence).
So far over a million human-defined assertions, rules or common sense ideas called ontologies make up the Cyc knowledge base. Similar to Roget's original thesaurus, an ontology is designed to capture a large portion of everyday human knowledge about the world. For example, a Cyc system might have a nature ontology which "knows" that clouds are usually in the sky. A temporal ontology might know that over time puppies become adult dogs, while a gravity ontology could tell it that objects fall towards the ground if not supported.
Barbara Ann Kipfer, a Connecticut lexicographer involved in AI projects, has written a popular book 14,000 Things to Be Happy About ISBN 0894803700 (amazon.com, search) which essentially is a happiness ontology.
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