From Data Repositories to Knowledge Repositories

Abstract

In the 1970’s computerized information (collected set of data items) was used for general management support in the form of management information systems. Since the 1980’s computerized information has been regarded as a strategic resource. The 1990’s decade can be labeled as the era of globalization of economies. Organizations in the developed world are shifting from purely information based to knowledge based organizations. Today knowledge is being regarded as a strategic resource for gaining competitive advantage. The emphasis today is on intelligent decision making. This shift in emphasis can be seen with development of intelligent systems at various levels of an organization. The emergence of knowledge discovery and data mining area for extraction of intelligent meaningful knowledge from millions of records of data is an evidence of this shift or change in emphasis. This shift or change in emphasis can be called as process of building knowledge repositories from data repositories. The transition from data repositories to knowledge repositories has three primary ingredients, namely, data, information, and knowledge. These three ingredients are used for system modeling in the data engineering, information engineering, and knowledge engineering layers of an organization.