Knowledge base

A knowledge base (abbreviated KB, kb or Δ) is a special kind of database for knowledge management. A knowledge base provides a means for information to be collected, organised, shared, searched and utilised.

Types

Knowledge bases are essentially closed or open information repositories and can be categorised under three main headings:

• Machine-readable knowledge bases 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. An ontology can define the structure of stored data - what types of entities are recorded and what their relationships are. Logical operators, such as And (conjunction), Or (disjunction), material implication and negation may be used to build it up from simpler pieces of information. Consequently, classical deduction can be used to reason about the knowledge in the knowledge base. Some machine-readable knowledge bases are used with artificial intelligence, for example as part of an expert system that focuses on a domain like prescription drugs or customs law. Such knowledge bases are also used by the semantic web.

• Human-readable knowledge bases are designed to allow people to retrieve and use the knowledge they contain. They are commonly used to complement a help desk or for sharing information among employees within an organization. They might store troubleshooting information, articles, white papers, user manuals, knowledge tags, or answers to frequently asked questions. Typically, a search engine is used to locate information in the system, or users may browse through a classification scheme.

A text based system that can include groups of documents including hyperlinks between them is known as Hypertext Systems. Hypertext systems support the decision process by relieving the user of the significant effort it takes to relate and remember things." Knowledge bases can exist on both computers and mobile phones in a hypertext format.

A human-readable base can be coupled with a machine-readable one, via uni- or bidirectional replication or some real-time interface. In that case, client programs may use reasoning on computer-readable portion of data to provide better search of appropriate human-readable texts, to check the integrity of facts found in different text documents, to provide better authoring tools for texts etc. An example is the machine-readable DBpedia extraction from human-readable Wikipedia.

• Knowledge base analysis and design (also known as KBAD) is an approach that allows people to conduct analysis and design in a way that results in a knowledge base, which can later be used to make informative decisions. This approach was first implemented by Dr. Steven H. Dam.

See also

• Commonsense knowledge base
• Enterprise bookmarking
• Text mining
• List of artificial intelligence projects

Informational formats

• Faq
• How-to
• Tutorial
• Wiki
• Flowchart

External links

• "Knowledge Based Systems"
• Content Repository API
• Computability Logic Homepage
• Protégé, an open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework
• OMCSNet-WNLG, partial wordsense disambiguated version of the OMCSNet knowledge base
• Knowledge base software examples by Helpjuice.com