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Knowledge base

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Categories: Computer stubs | Technical communication | Knowledge representation

A knowledge base is a special kind of database for knowledge management and can be abbreviated KB, kb or Δ.

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). It provides the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval of knowledge.

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.

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