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 a large common sense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. Since its founding in 1999, it has accumulated more than 700,000 English facts from over 15,000 contributors. The knowledge collected by Open Mind Common Sense has enabled dozens of research projects at MIT and elsewhere. The ConceptNet and LifeNet commonsense knowledge bases are derived from parsing the collected data.

The project was largely the brainchild of Push Singh who was slated to become a professor at the MIT Media Lab to lead the Commonsense Computing group in 2007 until his suicide on Tuesday, February 28, 2006.

Other similar projects include Mindpixel, Cyc, and Open Mind 1001 Questions, which have explored alternative approaches to collecting knowledge and providing incentive for participation. The Open Mind Common Sense project differed from Cyc because it focused on representing the common sense knowledge it collected as English sentences, rather than using a formal logical structure. This means that the information didn't use a standardized vocabulary with strict definitions for each component of the common sense knowledge.