Knowledge

Knowledge may refer to any of the following:

1. In general, knowledge is the familiarity or understanding of a topic that's gained through experience or study. For example, someone with computer knowledge has a broad understanding of computers, and the software and hardware used on a computer.

2. With a company, product, or service, knowledge may be the information used to help maintain and support the company, product, or service. For example, a company may have a knowledge base or FAQ (frequently asked questions) with support information for answering questions. Creating a knowledge base helps your employees and customers find answers to questions without relying on support or an individual with all the answers.

3. With AI (artificial intelligence), KR (knowledge representation) or KRR (knowledge representation and reasoning) is what helps a machine have intelligent behavior. This knowledge is gained from human training, collecting world knowledge, or gained (inferenced) from the machine creating new intelligence based on what it already knows. Below are different methods of how knowledge may be represented and stored.

Relational knowledge

Relational knowledge is information stored in a relational database or file that's all related. For example, customer information for a business may be stored in a relational database that stores knowledge (e.g., full name, address, phone number) about the customer.

With this knowledge, a machine could answer questions like "What is Nathan's phone number?"

Inheritable knowledge

With inheritable knowledge, information is stored in a hierarchy of buckets, classes, or tables that inherit knowledge from other buckets, classes, or tables. By storing knowledge in these areas, the machine can determine an answer or proceed to the next action if enough information is inherited.

With this knowledge, a machine could answer a question like "Can an apple be purple?"

Inferential knowledge

Inferential knowledge is represented as facts learned by a machine or entered by a human. These facts can subsequently aid in providing responses to inquiries or determining the next course of action for a machine.

For example, a machine may know that an apple is a fruit, fruit is food, and that food can be eaten to gain energy. When asked a question like "How can I gain energy?" a machine with this knowledge could infer that an apple can be eaten to gain energy.

Procedural knowledge

With procedural knowledge, a machine may use several programs or specially designed code to perform a specific task. The decision-making with this type of system may rely on conditional statements to decide what program or code to execute.

For example, when performing a search on Computer Hope, our search engine uses procedural knowledge to determine the search type. If a question like "How to turn on a computer" is searched, the search engine relies on code designed to answer questions. If the search is not a question (e.g., "turn on"), it skips trying to answer a question and uses other code to handle the query.

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