'Yugoslavia is a country'. Are you really going to exclude that? So, no statements about political geography at all, then. Same problem for physical geography ('New Moore Island exists'). Nothing about climate (because 'the rain in Spain' could change at any time), nothing about population levels. Even the sample 'average weight of an apple' is pretty suspect. I think your database is going to be quite limited.

> 'Yugoslavia is a country'. Are you really going to exclude that?

Yes, of course.

> So, no statements about political geography at all, then.

Absolutely not, you just have to make time explicit.

What calendar will you use?

Edit: It seems we're arguing about what a priori knowledge is capable of serving as a base for factual deductions. The Kantian approach is to say that we all agree on time and space and everything can be based off of these self-evident truths. I think there is not such a clear boundary between objective truth and induction.

Edit2: I'd also like to take this moment to point out that "you're" is the proper contraction of "you are", since we're getting all semantic.

This has suddenly become very philosophical. My view is that a database of facts should contain things that are believed to be facts. It should be possible to remove facts that are shown to be incorrect, but those things should never have been true.

> I'd also like to take this moment to point out that "you're" is the proper contraction of "you are", since we're getting all semantic.

I know, it annoys me too. By the time I'd realized it was too late to edit. Typos happen.

"My view is that a database of facts should contain things that are believed to be facts. It should be possible to remove facts that are shown to be incorrect, but those things should never have been true."

But they definitely were true. I thought you were making a distinction between 'something that is true' and 'something that is a fact (ie: is unchangingly true)' which I don't think most people make.

It'd be the solipsist's database: "I exist" would be the only entry.

It's pretty obvious you'd didn't consider statements like that. There are a large number of examples that make your statement of the invariance of facts absurd.