Inferencing and Facts

In my previous post I started a discussion on Reasoning and Inferencing. Going by very definition of inferencing it is an act of attaining conclusion based on certain facts. But what is fact? The facts could be

• Universal Truths like Sun rises in east, it is winter in Australia.
• Statements about an object instance. Toyota Yaris, YRS Rego ABC 123. Here we are considering only about one car.
• A general statement about all objects of one type. Toyota cars are better than Honda in terms of easy maintenance (I am not going to start car manufacturer war here).
• Statement applicable to more than one type of object. If battery is down then none of the battery operated or petrol vehicle will start.
  

But the actual problem is not what the fact is. The problem begins when we want to store the fact for computer systems to understand and reason. We need to store them in our KnowledgeBase which is nothing else but a collection of facts about one or more entities. To store facts in KB we need to have few issues sorted out like:

1. How do we represent the facts in Computer System?
2. How do we link the facts to the entities they describe about?
3. How do we retrieve the facts and relate them to the entities?
4. How do we find all the facts that are known about an entity?

There are many such buzzing questions which needs to be answered before we go ahead with building a system that infers these facts. I would like to get an opinion from the readers as what their opinion is.

Until Next Time...!!!