This article is the second installment in a three-part series. Now for those of you that survived Part I and came back for more, we have no alternative but to treat you accordingly. By the time we're done we will have thoroughly tortured you with terms like knowledge acquisition, inference engine, knowledge base, natural language interface, explanation subsystem and smart agent. While today s applications are getting easier to use and providing us with more and more information they cannot be classified as smart systems unless they have both of these characteristics. Intelligent searches are used to access a knowledge base.
Intelligent searches use knowledge, probability, logic, and heuristics to locate information.
In contrast, traditional database searches locate information by keys in sorted order or by sequential search. The fact that the names are sorted in alphabetical order makes for a fast search and retrieval. Secondly, the ability of a search routine to explain the results of a search is beyond the scope of a traditional database query. On the surface a database system and a knowledgebase system might look the same, but beneath the feathers they are totally different birds. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and you're still not convinced, then it s probably not a duck.