End of an Era

hi commonsensers and omcsneters,

if you've been living under a rock for the past two weeks you may not have
heard, but otherwise you probably have: OMCSNet is now ConceptNet.

accompanying the name change, you can expect to see some other changes as
well shortly:

0) a slick new website: http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/conceptnet/ with
push's cool flash conceptnet browser. please update your links

1) new paper! it's on the website now. do read, it's a much cleaner update
over the old omcsnet paper.

2) cleaning up the knowledge. we will be using an ontological grammar to
"structure" the english contents of a node. this way, nodes will be
annotated with info about what they are, e.g. semantic (person, place,
thing, activity, event, situation) and syntactic (noun phrase, adjective
phrase, verb phrase). the type hierarchy will look much like the one found
in CRIS (ARIA's commonsense robust inference system, the granddaddy of
ConceptNet).

3) connecting the knowledge better. english nodes have an advantage in
that they can be merged dynamically, based on semantic similarity. for
example, sometimes you want "purchase groceries" and "buy food" to be the
same node, other times, you want to keep them separated. we will be using
wordnet for the relaxation. ian has already done begun doing neat little
things like linking "cookie" and "eat cookie" together with similarTo edges

4) more data more instances. comin from mining the web. coming soon! look
for stuff like
"IsA(Britney Spears, pop star)"


thanks for reading this! and please remember to update your web and
lexical pointers from OMCSNet to ConceptNet!


*sigh* Oh well.