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A knowledge base (or knowledgebase; abbreviated KB
KB

The abbreviation KB or kb can refer to:*Kilobit , a unit of information used, for example, to quantify computer memory or storage capacity...
, kb or ?) is a special kind of database
Database

A database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system. The structure is achieved by organizing the data according to a database model....
 for knowledge management
Knowledge management

Knowledge Management comprises a range of Best practice used in an organisation to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences....
, providing the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval
Retrieval

Retrieval could refer to:* Information Retrieval* Text retrieval* * Document retrieval* Music information retrieval* Medical retrieval* In psychology, retrieval refers to the process of recalling information that is stored in memory...
 of knowledge
Knowledge

Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation....
.








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A knowledge base (or knowledgebase; abbreviated KB
KB

The abbreviation KB or kb can refer to:*Kilobit , a unit of information used, for example, to quantify computer memory or storage capacity...
, kb or ?) is a special kind of database
Database

A database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system. The structure is achieved by organizing the data according to a database model....
 for knowledge management
Knowledge management

Knowledge Management comprises a range of Best practice used in an organisation to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences....
, providing the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval
Retrieval

Retrieval could refer to:* Information Retrieval* Text retrieval* * Document retrieval* Music information retrieval* Medical retrieval* In psychology, retrieval refers to the process of recalling information that is stored in memory...
 of knowledge
Knowledge

Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation....
.

Types

Knowledge bases are categorized into two major types:

  • Machine-readable knowledge bases store knowledge in a computer-readable form, usually for the purpose of having automated deductive reasoning
    Deductive reasoning

    Deductive reasoning, sometimes called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive Argument s.In logic, an argument is said to be deductive when the truth of the conclusion is purported to follow necessarily or be a logical consequence of the premises and its corresponding conditional is a necessary truth....
     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
    Ontology (computer science)

    In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a Domain of discourse and the relationships between those concepts....
     can define the structure of stored data - what types of entities are recorded and what their relationships are. Logical operators, such as And (conjunction
    Conjunction

    Conjunction can refer to:*Conjunction , an astronomical phenomenon*Astrological aspect, an aspect in horoscopic astrology*Grammatical conjunction, a part of speech...
    ), Or (disjunction), material implication and negation
    Negation

    In logic and mathematics, negation or not is an operation on logical values, for example, the logical value of a proposition, that sends true to false and false to true....
     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
    Artificial intelligence

    Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...
    , for example as part of an expert system
    Expert system

    An expert system is software that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence....
     that focuses on a domain like prescription drugs or customs law. Such knowledge bases are also used by the semantic web
    Semantic Web

    The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content....
    .


  • 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
    Help desk

    A help desk is an information and assistance resource that troubleshoots problems with computers or similar products. Corporations often provide help desk support to their customers via a toll-free number, website and/or e-mail....
     or for sharing information among employees within an organization
    Organization

    An organization is a social arrangement which pursues collective goals, which controls its own performance, and which has a boundary separating it from its environment....
    . They might store troubleshooting
    Troubleshooting

    Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving most often applied to repair of failed products or processes. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem so that it can be solved, and so the product or process can be made operational again....
     information, articles, white paper
    White paper

    A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions....
    s, user manual
    User guide

    A user guide, also commonly known as a manual, is a technical communication document intended to give assistance to people using a particular system....
    s, or answers to frequently asked questions. Typically, a search engine
    Search engine

    A search engine is an information retrieval designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits....
     is used to locate information in the system, or users may browse through a classification
    Library classification

    Library classification forms part of the field of library and information science. It is a form of bibliographic classification . It goes hand in hand with library cataloging under the rubric of cataloging and classification, sometimes grouped together as technical services....
     scheme.


Implementations

  • dbpedia
    DBpedia

    DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows users to ask expressive queries against Wikipedia and to interlink other datasets on the Web with DBpedia data....
  • freebase (database)
    Freebase (database)

    Freebase is a large collaborative knowledge base. It is an online database harvested from many sources, including individual 'wiki' contribution....
  • Cyc
    Cyc

    Cyc is an List of notable artificial intelligence projects that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling artificial intelligence applications to perform human-like reasoning....
  • yago (database)
    YAGO (database)

    YAGO is a knowledge base developed at the Max-Planck-Institute Saarbr?cken.The knowledge base contains information harvested from Wikipedia and linked to Wordnet....


The TeraGrid
TeraGrid

TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery Information Infrastructure combining large computing resources at nine Resource Provider partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource....
 distributed supercomputing system provides a knowledge base for user support.

Health Science

  • Tufts University School of Medicine
    Tufts University School of Medicine

    The Tufts University School of Medicine is one of the eight schools that comprise Tufts University. Located on the university's health sciences campus in the Chinatown district of Boston, Massachusetts, the medical school has clinical affiliations with thousands of doctors and researchers in the United States and around the world, as well as...
     has created a software infrastructure called the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, TUSK
    TUSK (Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase)

    TUSK, Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, is an online management system which supports faculty and students in teaching and learning....
    . It serves as a knowledge base 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 seven schools in the U.S., Africa, and India.


  • A pediatric
    Pediatrics

    Differences between adult and pediatric medicinePediatrics differs from adult medicine in many respects. The obvious body size differences are paralleled by maturational changes....
     research group at the British Columbia's Children's Hospital
    British Columbia's Children's Hospital

    BC Children's Hospital is a medical facility located in Vancouver, British Columbia. and is an agency of the Provincial Health Services Authority....
     has created a knowledge base authoring tool called iKnow. It is used by clinicians at the hospital to develop knowledge rules for improving patient care in surgical operations
    Surgery

    Surgery is a medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, to help improve bodily function or appearance, or sometimes for some other reason....
    . A decision support system
    Decision support system

    Decision support systems constitute a class of computer-based information systems including knowledge based system that support decision-making activities....
     then runs the rules in the operating room to assist anesthesiologists in dealing with adverse event
    Adverse event

    An adverse event is any adverse change in health or "side-effect" that occurs in a person who participates in a clinical trial while the patient is receiving the treatment or within a pre-specified period of time after their treatment has been completed....
    s. The knowledge base developed is machine-readable and also has a human interface called iKnow.


CHORUS, the "Collaborative Hypertext of Radiology", is an expert system used by doctors to help interpret medical images and diagnose patients.

See also

  • Commonsense knowledge bases
    Commonsense knowledge bases

    In artificial intelligence research, commonsense knowledge is the collection of facts and information that an ordinary person is expected to know....
  • Text mining
    Text mining

    Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers generally to the process of deriving high-quality information from text....
  • List of artificial intelligence projects


Informational formats
  • Faq
    FAQ

    Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic....
  • How-to
    How-to

    A how-to or a how to is an informal, often short, description of how to accomplish some specific task. A how-to is generally meant to help non-experts, may leave out details that are only important to experts, and may also be greatly simplified from an overall discussion of the topic....
  • Tutorial
    Tutorial

    A tutorial is one method of transferring knowledge and may be used as a part of learning. More interactivity and specific than a book or a lecture; a tutorial seeks to teach by example and supply the information to complete a certain task....
  • Wiki
    Wiki

    A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content , using a simplified markup language....


External links