Monday, July 21, 2008

Entities and Representing Facts

In my previous post I started a discussion about Inferencing and Facts. The biggest challenge we have is how to represent these facts in the computer system. Last week I was reading the paper "A Library of Generic Concepts for Composing Knowledge Bases" by Ken Barker, Bruce Porter and Peter Clark, Proceedings of K-CAP 01, October 22-23 2001.

In this paper the authors make a classification between Entities and Events. Entities are things that are and Events are things that happen. Events are states and actions. States are static situation brought about or changed by actions.

To elaborate further on this Entities are the state information or the facts. Actions apply on those entities. So if we revisit our earlier post the facts can be represented as attributes of an object. Like Sun rises in east can be represented as Rising Direction (Predicate) attribute of Sun (Subject) with a value East (an instance of type direction). Similarly we can also represent other facts mentioned in the earlier post.

Any second thought????

Until Next Time ....