Real World Knowledge for Databases
Veda C. Storey · Journal of Database Management · 1992
A number of expert systems have been developed recently that attempt to automate the database design process. One of the well-known problems with these and other types of expert systems is that, although they possess a high degree of expertise in their specific application areas, they usually know very little about anything outside those areas or about how the real world functions. This results in the need to ask the user many questions that a human expert would not need to ask about an application. It has been suggested that it would be beneficial for a database design system to be able to acquire general, or real world, knowledge over time as it is applied from one design session to another. Before this can be happen, however, an understanding is required of what constitutes real world knowledge as well as how it can benefit database design systems. In this paper, various types of knowledge are examined and organized into a framework. The framework is then used to show how real world knowledge can be incorporated into database design expert systems.Request access from your librarian to read this article's full text.