Many products such as decision support systems require knowledge in order to make intelligent decisions. A decision support system is a computer-based system that combines knowledge, analytical tools, and models to aid a decision maker. A decision support system commonly includes a knowledge database or a knowledge repository. Knowledge is extracted from the knowledge database or repository and analyzed using the analytical tools and models in order to assist with decisions. In order to be useful to the decision support system, data must be analyzed, translated and organized into structured, meaningful knowledge before it is stored in the knowledge database.
Often, data is in the form of human readable documentation, which to the decision support system appears as unstructured, meaningless data. Data refers to information, raw facts, and the like. Data may exist in a variety of forms such as in paper documents or in digital documents. Data on its own has no meaning to a decision support system. For a decision support system to process data, the data must first be translated into a form that the decision support system can process.
As used herein, knowledge refers to information that can be processed by a decision support system. A collection of knowledge is referred to as a knowledge base or a knowledge repository. Even structured data formats such as the standard generalize markup language (SGML) or the extendible markup language (XML) may be unsuitable to the decision support system since not all of the needed knowledge may be tagged by markup. Human translation of data to knowledge is laborious, expensive, and error-prone; especially for data sources that are periodically updated. Special purpose knowledge base construction programs are often too inflexible to directly apply, or too costly to modify for new types of data and/or knowledge repositories.
What is needed is a way to convert unstructured, meaningless data, such as human consumable information, into structured, meaningful knowledge, i.e., machine consumable knowledge.