Fact Base

I. What It Is

Fact Base is a collection of facts that stores known assertions available during the reasoning process, which can include:

  • Explicitly provided domain facts (e.g., “Zhang San is a student”, “A is B’s father”, etc.);
  • Facts dynamically imported from external systems (e.g., the “Three-Repository System”) (still under development);
  • New facts continuously derived during the reasoning process.

In implementation, Fact Base maintains two layers of sets:

  • facts: “all facts” known to the system;
  • cur_facts: a subset of facts that actually participates in reasoning for this problem-solving session.

A typical workflow is:

  1. Provide the question Question;

  2. The engine calls initial_fact_base(question, topn=...):

    • Heuristically selects from facts the portion most relevant to the current question;
    • Requests additional facts associated with this question from external systems;
    • Puts them all into cur_facts as the starting point for this round of reasoning.

II. Input Methods

2.1 String Form

WIP

2.2 Python Code

Generally entered via the Assertion class.