Knowledge base
A knowledge base is a special kind of database for knowledge management and can be abbreviated KB or kb. It provides the means for computerized collection, organization, and retrieval of knowledge.
Knowledge bases 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 knowledge base 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 (computer science) 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 based on feedback provided by the user, and are capable of learning from experience. See expert system.
See also
- Ontology (computer science)
- Cyc, OpenCyc
- RuleML
- Computability logic
- Semantic Web
- Scone Knowledge Base