Thursday, June 05, 2008  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.