Knowledgebased

Knowledgebased is an adjective used to describe systems, approaches, or economies that rely primarily on structured knowledge as the basis for action, reasoning, or value creation, rather than solely on raw data or statistical correlations.

In artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems are built on explicit representations of domain knowledge, such as rules, ontologies, or frames. They typically include a knowledge base and an inference engine and are designed to simulate expert reasoning, provide explanations, and support decision making. Knowledge-based approaches emphasize explainability and transferability, but they can suffer from bottlenecks in knowledge acquisition and maintenance, and may be brittle when confronted with unfamiliar situations.

In business and economics, the term is used within the concept of a knowledge-based economy, where value is created through knowledge and intangible assets such as human capital, research and development, intellectual property, and information infrastructure. Organizations pursuing knowledge-based strategies focus on education, innovation, collaboration, and information systems to enhance productivity and competitiveness. Knowledge-based management aims to improve decision making and performance by leveraging both tacit and explicit knowledge, often through practices like knowledge sharing, communities of practice, and knowledge graphs.

Historically, knowledge-based approaches gained prominence in the AI field during the 1970s and 1980s with expert systems, which encoded domain expertise as rules. Since then, there has been ongoing integration with data-driven methods, leading to hybrids that combine structured knowledge with machine learning, semantic technologies, and ontologies. Critics point to challenges in knowledge elicitation, scalability, and maintenance, while proponents argue that knowledge-based components improve transparency and domain reliability.