A knowledge engine is part of a
decision-support system that combines data with data models and inference rules to provide an interface for people who want to make decisions or discover related data. It may involve automatically extracting and structuring knowledge from less-structured sources, using these models and rules.
History
In the late 1990s, the Decision Support Group at the
University of Fribourg
The University of Fribourg (; ) is a public university located in Fribourg, Switzerland.
The roots of the university can be traced back to 1580, when the notable Jesuit Peter Canisius founded the Collège Saint-Michel in the City of Fribourg ...
developed a model for decision support software. This described the interface between data and models on one hand, and graphical interfaces for exploring them and making decisions on the other, as a knowledge engine. They also developed a mathematical modeling language,
LPL, in concert with that work.
With the rise of the semantic web, natural language processing, and topical knowledge bases, a number of other analytical tools have been categorized as knowledge engines, including in genomics (KnowEnG), modeling human action (PaStaNet), and speeding up general-purpose
question answering
Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP) that is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions that are posed by humans in a n ...
.
General-purpose search and discovery tools such as
WolframAlpha
WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.
History
Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on Ma ...
have also described themselves as knowledge engines.
See also
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Knowledge engineering
Knowledge engineering (KE) refers to all aspects involved in knowledge-based systems.
Background Expert systems
One of the first examples of an expert system was MYCIN, an application to perform medical diagnosis. In the MYCIN example, the ...
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Knowledge engineer
A knowledge engineer is a professional engaged in the science of building advanced logic into computer systems in order to try to simulate human decision-making and high-level cognitive tasks. A knowledge engineer supplies some or all of the "know ...
References
Knowledge engineering
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