Knowledge base
A
knowledge base (abbreviated
KB,
kb or Î") is a special kind of
database for
knowledge management. It provides the means for the computerized
collection, organization, and
retrieval of
knowledge.
Just as it has become standard practice to write
database as one word it is increasingly common in computer science to write
knowledgebase as one word (an interim approach was to write the term with a hyphen).
Knowledgebases are categorized into two major types:
*
Machine-readable knowledgebases store knowledge in a computer-readable form, usually for the purpose of having automated
deductive reasoning applied to them. They contain a set of data, often in the form of rules that describe the knowledge in a logically consistent manner. Logical operators such as
And (
conjunction),
Or (
disjunction),
material implication and
negation may be used to build it up from the atomic knowledge. Consequently classical deduction can be used to reason about the knowledge in the knowledge base.
*
Human-readable knowledgebases are designed to allow people to retrieve and use the knowledge they contain, primarily for training purposes. They are commonly used to capture explicit knowledge of an
organization, including
troubleshooting, articles,
white papers,
user manuals and others. The primary benefit of such a knowledge base is to provide a means to discover solutions to problems that have known solutions which can be re-applied by others, less experienced in the problem area.
The most important aspect of a knowledgebase is the quality of information it contains. The best knowledge bases have carefully written articles that are kept up to date, an excellent information retrieval system (search engine), and a carefully designed content format and
classification structure.
A knowledge base may use an
ontology to specify its structure (entity types and relationships) and its classification scheme. An ontology, together with a set of instances of its classes constitutes a knowledge base.
Determining what type of information is captured, and where that information resides in a knowledge base is something that is determined by the processes that support the system. A robust process structure is the backbone of any successful knowledge base.
Some knowledge bases have an
artificial intelligence component. These kinds of knowledge bases can suggest solutions to problems sometimes based on feedback provided by the user, and are capable of learning from experience. See
expert system. Knowledge representation, automated reasoning and argumentation are active areas of research at the forefront of
artificial intelligence.
Tufts University School of Medicine has created a software infrastructure called the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, TUSK. It serves as a knowledgebase for curricular information for the health sciences schools at Tufts (medical, dental,veterinary, public health, nutrition, graduate biomedical sciences). This infrastructure has been shared with three medical schools in the U.S., three in Africa and soon, one in India. The infrastructure enables institutions to create a knowledgebase serving local needs.
[Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase vision]*
Ontology (computer science)*
Cyc,
OpenCyc*
RuleML*
Computability logic*
Semantic Web*
faq*
how-to*
tutorial*
Wiki}}}
*
Whatis.com definition of Knowledge Base*
High Performance Knowledge Bases*
Content Repository API*
Computability Logic Homepage*
Protégé, an open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework
