What are Freebase "facts" and how are they counted?
-
-
What is considered a Freebase fact? Do Freebase "facts" include topics, types, and links established through type properties? If so, are reciprocated links counted as one or two facts? What else can you tell me about "facts" and how they are counted?
-
Ed, facts refer to the number of nodes and links in our system. For example, when you assert that 'Ed was born in the United States', you are adding one link of the property '/people/person/place_of_birth' which is 1 fact.
Nodes and links have a common name called a 'primitive'. Facts are a friendlier name for primitive.
In a lot of cases, things become trickier because of additional primitives that we need for accounting purposes. For example, if you create a node (such as 'United States') we need to keep track of permissions and attribution which might be additional primivites.
Other things are even less obvious: ordering of links (when you order the values of a property) incur additional primitive cost - and get counted towards facts. Every time you type a topic, that's one more link too.
The facts that you see associated with a user are calculated overnight and do not change during the day. This is for performance reasons (it's expensive for the database to count all these in real-time).
Hope this is useful!
-
Thanks Michael! Not useful, at least not right now, but 'twas informative. :)
-
