Monday, September 29, 2008

Final #4

Describe or Define KBS


Answer: Knowledge-based System (KBS) is a knowledge-based system as a computer system that is programmed to imitate human problem-solving by means of artificial intelligence and reference to a database of knowledge on a particular subject. Knowledge-based systems are systems based on the methods and techniques of Artificial Intelligence. Their core components are the knowledge base and the inference mechanisms.

Distinguish KBS from MIS

Provide information about its business operations. It's also used to refer to the people who manage these systems. Typically, in a large corporation, "MIS" or the "MIS department" refers to a central or centrally-coordinated system of computer expertise and management, often including mainframe systems but also including by extension the corporation's entire network of computer resources. While MIS imitate human problem-solving by means of artificial intelligence and reference to a database of knowledge on a particular subject.


Illustrate (give examples) how KBS can improve company's competitive advantage and organizational performance.

Answer: Provide consistent answers for repetitive decisions, processes and tasks.Hold and maintain significant levels of information.Reduces creating entry barriers to competitors. Review transactions that human experts may overlook.

Expert systems are most valuable to organizations that have a high-level of know-how experience and expertise that cannot be easily transferred to other members. They are designed to carry the intelligence and information found in the intellect of experts and provide this knowledge to other members of the organization for problem-solving purposes.

Typically, the problems to be solved are of the sort that would normally be tackled by a medical or other professional. Real experts in the problem domain (which will typically be very narrow, for instance "diagnosing skin conditions in human teenagers") are asked to provide "rules of thumb" on how they evaluate the problems, either explicitly with the aid of experienced systems developers, or sometimes implicitly, by getting such experts to evaluate test cases and using computer programs to examine the test data and (in a strictly limited manner) derive rules from that. Generally, expert systems are used for problems for which there is no single "correct" solution which can be encoded in a conventional algorithm — one would not write an expert system to find shortest paths through graphs, or sort data, as there are simply easier ways to do these tasks.

Simple systems use simple true/false logic to evaluate data, but more sophisticated systems are capable of performing at least some evaluation taking into account real-world uncertainties, using such methods as fuzzy logic. Such sophistication is difficult to develop and still highly imperfect.

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