What is ConceptNet

Early attempts to implement systems that understand commonsense knowledge did so for very restricted domains. For example, the Planes system [Waltz, 1978] knew real world facts about a fleet of airplanes and could answer questions about them put to it in English. It had, however, no behaviors, could not interpret the facts, draw inferences from them or solve problems, other than those that have to do with understanding the questions. At the other extreme, SHRDLU (Winograd, 1973) understood situations in its domain of discourse (which it perceived visually), accepted commands in natural language to perform behaviors in that domain and solved problems arising in execution of the commands; all these capabilities were restricted, however, to SHRDLU’s artificial world of colored toy blocks. Thus, in implemented systems it appears that there may be a trade off between the degree of realism of the domain and the number of capabilities that can be implemented. In the frames versus logic debate (see Commonsense Knowledge Representation I - Formalisms in this Encyclopedia), the real problem, in Israel’s (1983) opinion, is not the representation formalism itself, but rather that the facts of the commonsense world have not been formulated, and this is more critical than choice of a particular formalism. A notable attempt to formulate the “facts of the commonsense world” is that of Hayes [1978a, 1978b, 1979] under the heading of naïve physics. This work employs first-order predicate calculus to represent commonsense knowledge of the everyday physical world. The author of this survey has undertaken a similar effort with respect to commonsense business knowledge (Ein-Dor and Ginzberg 1989). Some broader attempts to formulate commonsense knowledge bases are cited in the section Commonsense Knowledge Bases.