Summaries

Overview

Every entity (node) in a Zep knowledge graph comes with a summary. The summary contains a summarized history of the facts and relationships that involve that entity.

Every time there is a new fact involving an existing entity, the summary is updated using the previous summary and the new information. This incremental update process ensures that entity summaries remain current and contextually relevant as the graph evolves.

Summaries vs Facts

Summaries are used in the default Zep context block. The default context block contains both facts and entity summaries because they represent different kinds of information.

Facts are granular information snippets. They capture specific, discrete pieces of knowledge with precise temporal validity.

Summaries are rich, entity-focused contextualized histories. They provide an aggregated narrative of an entity’s involvement across multiple facts and relationships.

Using both leads to better performance for most use cases. The combination provides both breadth and depth of context for grounding LLM responses.