I’ve been researching as of late a number of methods for ALF to store and recall “long term” data, things such as you might fond on Wikipedia etc etc and I’ve been playing around with various RDF/SPARQL methods to do this.

Not being much of a vet on SPARQL, I’ve spent quite a lot of time on Google learning about it and how the syntax of queries etc go together and I stumbled across a technology called “Cypher Transcoder”.

Whats interesting is that the creator named in the titled, claims it can convert a natural language string into a correct RDF/SPARQL query which you can then present to a database. 

Very cool, should it work even moderatley well, it would be a step in bridging a canyon the size of the Grand one in terms of Semantic Data - Human interacation and thus I was immediatley excited at the thought of trying it out and maybe sparking some conversations with the creator, banter some ideas around with him etc.

However, it seem’s he has vanished, and weirdly every possible site that I can find which offers a download of this program returns 404/not found etc.

Apparently he did some work many moons ago on the early Alicebot, but since 2009 theres absolutley no activity from him on the web anywhere.

Does anybody know him? Is he still around? Has anybody tried his tech? Was his program that good that it sparked a goverment coverup conspiracy?

Maybe the MiB busted him for trying to peddle off-world tech to us puny Earthlings?

lol, kidding. This is the first time I’ve heard of him, or of his project. It does sound intriguing, though. Maybe someone else knows more than ?I do. If he worked on ALICE early on, then maybe Dr Wallace could provide a clue or two. I’m not sure how often he drops by here, though.

It looks like he stopped pursuing cypher.

A quick google search turns up the following:

http://groups.google.com/group/cypher-developer

“The Cypher transcoder is a NLP engine that converts plain language statements and phrases into RDF triples and SPARQL queries. The software has been developed by Monrai Technologies with Sherman Monroe as principal investigator and chief software architect. In 1999, Sherman Monroe developed an idea for a “conversation front-end to databases” after discovering and tinkering with Dr. Richard Wallace’s Alicebot chatter bot on the web. Monroe’s original motive was to extend the functionality of Alicebot to achieve this. He made several contributions to the AIML specification, but after realizing the language itself was too limited for this task, he decided to build a completely new engine from scratch. Monroe’s design called for an Alicebot-like chat interface utilizing a robust NLP engine to process user input, and a knowledge representational language with enough semantic rigor to encapsulate the content of complex sentences and phrases. While a junior at Morehouse College, Monroe hacked the first prototype using Java and XML, which produced answers to user input by searching Google and splicing result pages into simple subject, main verb and direct object triples.”

http://sdmonroe.blogspot.com/search/label/cypher
http://www.linkedin.com/in/shermanmonroe