Knowledge management by example

Abstract

Knowledge has many components such as data, constraints, queries, transactions, and derivation rules. Data is the only component that can be managed effectively in large quantities. All other components are in their infancy in terms of tools and techniques for efficient storage and retrieval, implementation and execution, and user specification and design. One approach to manage all components of knowledge in large quantities is to reduce them all to data. Many components of knowledge can be expressed in terms of examples, and examples are data. As such, all these components can be stored and retrieved efficiently in large quantities, their execution reduces to data comparison and can be done in parallel, and they can be specified, designed, and modified by end users since examples are more intuitive and easy to manipulate than general procedures.