Repositories of knowledge about the real world and how it functions are needed to advance research in intelligent, knowledge-intensive systems. The repositories are intended to serve as surrogates for the meaning and context of terms and concepts. These are being developed at two levels: 1) individual domain ontologies that capture concepts about a particular application domain, and 2) upper level ontologies that contain massive amounts of knowledge about the real world and are domain independent. This paper analyzes ResearchCyc, which is a version of the most extensive base of common sense knowledge, the upper level ontology, Cyc. It does so to summarize the current state of the art in upper level ontology development in order to suggest areas for future research. The paper also describes various problems encountered in applying ResearchCyc to web query processing.
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