A fact is a piece of information that you derive from a data value when you compare it to other data values. For example, a date value might indicate a birthday, or it might indicate the date that you sent an invoice to a customer. You can use the date to determine if a person is an adult, or if a customer account is overdue. You can use the facts that you determine about the person or about the customer to make business decisions. A rule specification can determine a single fact, or it can determine multiple facts that operate in a dependent relationship to each other.

When one fact about the business data depends on multiple other facts, create rule sets in a parent and child relationship. Use the child rule sets to generate inputs that the parent rule set can verify. If a fact relates to a single item of data, you can configure rule statements to analyze the data in a single rule set. If a fact depends on multiple independent facts about the business data, create child rule sets in parallel to determine each fact.