Open Cyc is an open source version of the Cyc project. The Cyc project in an AI project started in 1984. It is essentially a giant Expert System, it defines a knowledge and rule representation, and contains hundreds of thousands of facts, concepts and rules. Cyc is owned by Cycorp, a privately held AI research company. Cycorp was also the name of the corporation in the Terminator movie series that created the first AI, so has somewhat of a coolness factor to it. Cyc is however just a rules processing system, so I would not worry too much about it gaining consciousness.