, the world's first web3pedia, is designed to be used, reviewed and edited both by people and by computers. inCyc pages are automatically produced by our artificial intelligence (AI) system, Cyc^®, using facts in its knowledge base, along with rules about to express and present them.

What can you do? For now, you can click around the thousands of pages already in inCyc, and get a feel how computer-written web pages look, and the variety of content they can contain. Soon, you'll be able to add to pages about the things you care about, or create new pages; you'll be able to say what sort of things you'd like to see in inCyc (and it'll try to add them); you'll be able to create mash-ups based on meaning, not code, and you'll be able to do intelligent search, based on what pages mean, not just on the words they use.

Web 3.0: We're calling inCyc a web3pedia, because it's a true web 3.0 application: everything is backed by machine understandable representations. AI software, like Cyc, can do more than just process this content, like conventional word-processors or search engines. It can reason about the content. In web3.0, pages can ask follow-up questions based on what they already contain, they can point out inconsistencies and consequences, and they can seek and add relevant content to themselves. Web 2.0 was all about interactivity and community participation; web 3.0 will be even more interactive: the content itself will be part of the community. Beta 0.5 of inCyc is just a start; in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out ways for you (and Cyc, our AI software) to interact with and add to the content in more and more powerful ways. Keep coming back for more!

Where it's from: Everything you see on inCyc pages has been automatically translated into English by Cyc, starting from knowledge-base content. (Sometimes the AI expresses things a little oddly … we did tell you this was a beta!) The knowledge inCyc is from a variety of sources, some of which are indicated with footnotes. Some of it was read by Cyc, automatically, from other documents, but most of the knowledge has been entered by people. Nothing was entered or learned specifically for this application; this seed of inCyc uses part of the knowledge that's been put into Cyc since 1985.

Although inCyc looks like a web site, it's based on cutting-edge AI technology. The single sentence from the "Republic of the Congo" page was written, by Cyc, by combining two facts (in the Knowledge Base since 1998 and 2003) with the results of reasoning (using a rule from 2003 and some more background facts). After assembling the facts, Cyc recognised that they could all go together into a single sentence, and then generated that sentence, in English, using information about English in its Knowledge Base. And all this happened because other background knowledge specified which sorts of things should appear in a page about a country.