A Common Facts Data Base

The origins of the project go back about ten years. At that time, I wanted to make a game that required a lot of information about animals which ones were dangerous, which ones were good for eating, how big they were, etc. So I manually constructed a relational data base listing all the common animals and all their important properties. There were several thousand animals, and each had about 100 properties, but because of inheritance, the total number or relations was only about 20,000. I used a relational data base because it seemed, for example, that a structure such as (aardvark weight-in-pounds 140) captured the information in a natural way. Structuring the information as pairs e.g., (rattlesnake poisonous) was sometimes more natural, but it was easy to encode pairs as triples (rattlesnake is poisonous), and harder to encode triples as pairs.