In artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 research, commonsense knowledge is the collection of facts and information that an ordinary person is expected to know. The commonsense knowledge problem is the ongoing project in the field of knowledge representation

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...

 (a sub-field of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

) to create a commonsense knowledge base: a database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

 containing all the general knowledge that most people possess, represented in a way that it is available to artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 programs that use natural language

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

 or make inferences about the ordinary world. Such a database is a type of ontology

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

 of which the most general are called upper ontologies

Upper ontology (computer science)

In information science, an upper ontology is an ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all knowledge domains. The most important function of an upper ontology is to support very broad semantic interoperability between a large number of ontologies accessible...

.

The problem is considered to be among the hardest in all of AI research because the breadth and detail of commonsense knowledge is enormous. Any task that requires commonsense knowledge is considered AI-complete

AI-complete

In the field of artificial intelligence, the most difficult problems are informally known as AI-complete or AI-hard, implying that the difficulty of these computational problems is equivalent to solving the central artificial intelligence problem—making computers as intelligent as people, or strong...

: to be done as well as a human being does it, it requires the machine to appear as intelligent as a human being. These tasks include machine translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

, object recognition

Object recognition

Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes / scale...

, text mining

Text mining

Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the devising of patterns and trends through means such as...

 and many others. To do these tasks perfectly, the machine simply has to know what the text is talking about or what objects it may be looking at, and this is impossible in general unless the machine is familiar with all the same concepts that an ordinary person is familiar with.

Information in a commonsense knowledge base may include, but is not limited to, the following:

• An ontology of classes and individuals
• Parts and materials of objects
• Properties of objects (such as color and size)
• Functions and uses of objects
• Locations of objects and layouts of locations
• Locations of actions and events
• Durations of actions and events
• Preconditions of actions and events
• Effects (postconditions) of actions and events
• Subjects and objects of actions
• Behaviors of devices
• Stereotypical situations or scripts
• Human goals and needs
• Emotions
• Plans and strategies
• Story themes
• Contexts

Commonsense knowledge bases

• Cyc
  Cyc
  Cyc is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning....
  
  
• Open Mind Common Sense
  Open Mind Common Sense
  Open Mind Common Sense is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web.Since its founding in 1999, it has...
  
   and ConceptNet
• ThoughtTreasure
  ThoughtTreasure
  ThoughtTreasure is a commonsense knowledge base and architecture for natural language processing.It contains both declarative and proceduralknowledge.-Declarative knowledge:ThoughtTreasure's knowledge baseconsists of concepts, which are...
  
  
• WordNet
  WordNet
  WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets...
  
  
• Basic Formal Ontology
  Basic Formal Ontology
  The Basic Formal Ontology is a formal ontological framework developed by Barry Smith and his associates that consists in a series of sub-ontologies at different levels of granularity...
  
   (BFO)
• DOLCE and DnS
• General Formal Ontology
  General Formal Ontology
  The general formal ontology is an upper ontology integrating processes and objects. GFO has been developed by Heinrich Herre, Barbara Heller and collaborators in Leipzig. Although GFO provides one taxonomic tree, different axiom systems may be chosen for its modules. In this sense, GFO provides...
  
  
• Suggested Upper Merged Ontology
  Suggested Upper Merged Ontology
  The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. It was originally developed by the Teknowledge Corporation and now is maintained by . It is one candidate for the "standard upper ontology"...
  
  
• Mindpixel
  Mindpixel
  Mindpixel was a web-based collaborative artificial intelligence project which aimed to create a knowledgebase of millions of human validated true/false statements, or probabilistic propositions. It ran from 2000 to 2005.-Description:...
  
  
• True Knowledge
  True Knowledge
  True Knowledge Ltd. company in Cambridge, England, founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, which specialises in knowledge base and semantic search engine software. Its first product was an answer engine that aimed to directly answer questions posed in plain English text, which is accomplished using a...
  
  

See also

• Ontology (computer science)
  Ontology (computer science)
  In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...
  
  
• Upper ontology
• Commonsense reasoning
  Commonsense reasoning
  Commonsense reasoning is the branch of Artificial intelligence concerned with replicating human thinking. There are several components to this problem, including:* Developing adequately broad and deep commonsense knowledge bases....
  
  
• Common sense
  Common sense
  Common sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." Thus, "common sense" equates to the knowledge and experience which most people already have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have...