Knowledge base

A knowledge base, is a kind of database that may contain both structured and unstructured data in a complicated manner for usage by a computer system. The word was initially used in reference to expert systems, which were the pioneering examples of knowledge-based computing at the time.

When first used, the phrase "knowledge base" was a way of referring to one of the two sub-systems that make up an expert system. A knowledge-based system includes a knowledge-base that is used to describe facts about the world as well as means of reasoning about those facts to infer new facts or point out contradictions.

The word database refers to a more prevalent and widespread manner of storing information, hence the phrase "knowledge-base" was created to differentiate this kind of knowledge storage from databases. In the 1970s, almost all big management information systems saved their data in a hierarchical or relational database of some kind. This practise continued throughout the 1980s. At this point in time in the development of information technology, the difference between a database and a knowledge base was crystal evident and left no room for interpretation.

In contrast to these database requirements, the data demands of the first generation of knowledge-based systems were entirely different. An expert system needs organised data. Not simply tables with numbers and strings, but also references to other objects that contain further pointers in their own right. A knowledge base should ideally be represented by an object model, which in the field of artificial intelligence is often referred to as an ontology. This model should have classes, subclasses, and instances.

The Internet represented the next stage in the development of the phrase "knowledge base." As a result of the proliferation of the Internet, providing support for documents, hypertext, and multimedia content is now essential for every business database. It was no longer sufficient to handle massive tables of data or relatively tiny things that resided mostly in computer memory. Both of these types of objects required more support. In order to provide support for business websites, persistence and transactions for documents were necessary. This resulted in the birth of an entirely new field that is today known as web content management.