Until the 1980s,
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...
s were viewed as computer systems that stored record-oriented and business data such as manufacturing inventories, bank records, and sales transactions. A database system was not expected to merge numeric data with text, images, or
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...
information, nor was it expected to automatically notice patterns in the data it stored. In the late 1980s the concept of an intelligent database was put forward as a system that manages information (rather than data) in a way that appears natural to users and which goes beyond simple record keeping.
The term was introduced in 1989 by the book ''Intelligent Databases'' by
Kamran Parsaye,
Mark Chignell, Setrag Khoshafian and
Harry Wong. The concept postulated three levels of intelligence for such systems: high level tools, the
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
and the
database engine
A database engine (or storage engine) is the underlying software component that a database management system (DBMS) uses to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) data from a database. Most database management systems include their own application ...
. The high level tools manage data quality and automatically discover relevant patterns in the data with a process called
data mining. This layer often relies on the use of
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
techniques. The user interface uses
hypermedia
Hypermedia, an extension of the term hypertext, is a nonlinear medium of information that includes graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks. This designation contrasts with the broader term ''multimedia'', which may include non-interac ...
in a form that uniformly manages text, images and numeric data. The intelligent database engine supports the other two layers, often merging
relational database
A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...
techniques with
object orientation.
In the twenty-first century, intelligent databases have now become widespread, e.g. hospital databases can now call up patient histories consisting of charts, text and x-ray images just with a few mouse clicks, and many corporate databases include
decision support
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and ...
tools based on sales pattern analysis.
External links
''Intelligent Databases'' book
{{Database
Databases
Artificial intelligence