GC: n
CT: An intelligent database is a full-text database with artificial intelligence (AI) components that interact with users to ensure that users are supplied all relevant information. The AI portion is most often seen during searches providing intellectual operations and knowledge representations that are usually based on the connectionist neural network models. So, an intelligent database is a system that manages information, rather than simple data, and presents it in such a way that is natural and informative for users. As a result, its capacity is far beyond simple record keeping.
S: Techopedia – http://www.techopedia.com/definition/14703/intelligent-database (last access: 26 November 2014)
N: 1. intelligent (adj): c.1500, a back-formation from intelligence or else from Latin intelligentem (nominative intelligens), present participle of intelligere, earlier intellegere.
database (n): also data base, attested from 1962, from data + base.
data (n): 1640s, plural of datum, from Latin datum “(thing) given,” neuter past participle of dare “to give”. Meaning “transmittable and storable computer information” first recorded 1946. Data processing is from 1954.
base (n): “bottom, foundation, pedestal,” early 14c., from Old French bas “depth” (12c.), from Latin basis “foundation,” from Greek basis “step, pedestal,” from bainein “to step”.
2. Traditional databases give users little help in terms of accessing the database itself. They are searchable by keywords and phrases that are connected by Boolean operations such as AND, OR and NOT. Intelligent database interfaces, however, are cache-based, and are designed to efficiently access one or more database management systems (DBMSs), remote or not.
3. Currently there are very few intelligent databases in use; most are in the research stage. Most databases provide some help with the mechanical operations of working the database, and some help with the intellectual operations, that is, the search. But it would be useful for the computer to help even before the search, in asking the right questions.
Ideally, what a database should do, and what it might be able to do in the future, is to search by content, not just by string or keyword matching. It should be able to match overnight what the user is working on with other information in the user’s company or in other databases in the world. And finally, it should evaluate and synthesize the information found, in order to help the user ask the right questions, so that the search for answers might begin.
4. There are several problems with intelligent databases. As with any database, finding that first article can be time-consuming. Computers have problems with ambiguous uses of words, and with words that have multiple meanings. Currently it is impossible to build into a knowledge base a broad sense of the world, so context is a problem.
S: 1. OED – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=database&searchmode=none (last access: 26 November 2014). 2. Technopedia – http://www.techopedia.com/definition/14703/intelligent-database (last access: 26 November 2014). 3 & 4. MSU – https://www.msu.edu/~sleightd/Inteldat.html (last access: 26 November 2014).
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