How is a knowledge base different from a database?
A database contains details about sets of particular things – for example it might contain lists of people, lists of companies, and lists of products. A knowledge base, on the other hand, primarily describes what is known about certain types of things in general. So, for example, it would say that people have parents, a birthplace, etc., but would normally not describe a large number of particular people. A knowledge base can, therefore, be used to describe the structure of a database (sometimes this is called the schema or the metadata). A knowledge base can do far more than that, however – it can describe all that is known and the relationships among a large number of different interrelated things.
