Knowledge representation… not the best example :-)

I’ve been looking at the OpenCyc Foundation’s Concept Browser page. I searched for the concept “product”. It took me to a helpful page that says:

Each instance of

sales product

is a

thing that exists in time

that is, or was at one time, offered for sale or performed as a commercial service, or was produced with the intent of being offered for sale. Positive examples of

sales product

include:

– a barrel of crude oil being shipped to a customer;

– a completely assembled automobile in a factory;

…

So far so good.

Then, under the section called “Examples of Sales product”, they have a number of “Ballistic missile” entries. They all point to different entities. Obviously no disambiguation has been done. The same with “Cruise Missile“, Iranian phantom fighter planes, etc. Has the arms sales market picked up so much? 🙂

It seems that even “The Hubble Space Telescope“, “Sputnik“, etc. are listed under the same category.

Or, if you fancy an aircraft carrier, there are few examples under “product sales”: “USS Nimitz“, “USS Independence“, etc. I wonder whether Amazon sales them.

Seeing biological weapons scared me though. I didn’t even know that there was an “Y2 Stage 4 Anthrax Sprayer” in existence. Scary!

Obviously these are not manually entered entries but the result of some automated inferencing process going wrong or some information extraction algorithm not doing the right thing.