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Welcome to the general-billy wiki!

General Billy, besides being a fearsome if diminutive military tactician, would be a generalization of Sunlight Labs' billy project, which is the real base code underlying their Open States project. The idea is to provide an extensible framework that can be used for scraping and sharing data about ANY situation where:

1. a group of individuals are engaged in creating and codifying rules or proclamations; and
2. the individuals are accountable for their published decisions and actions in this process.

This strikes me as being primarily a knowledge representation/ontological engineering problem. Looking at a wide variety of situations that fit this description (by no means restricting oneself to governments in first/second world countries, or even governments at all), what do they have in common? What possible facets become apparent in attempting to classify these situations, the individuals involved, the sorts of rules they make, the actions involved in their process? What ontologies already exist, how expressive and usable are they, and how widely are they used? How do the various psuedo-standard upper ontologies represent these sorts of things, if at all?

Steven Collins has years of work with and on Cyc, so he may be better suited to answer these questions than most. He actually was looking at the representation of bills and laws in full commercial Cyc not too very long ago, and came away thinking it leaved a lot to be desired. So probably for that reason, among others, OpenCyc per se is not a full answer to these questions.