Knowledge representation is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can utilize to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets (Wikipedia).
Translated for the use of enterprises, knowledge representation provides the most efficient means for non-technical data consumers to access and retrieve data stored in databases (in the form of tables and columns for example), using abstract concepts that represent the real world (known as semantics in knowledge representation), such as “customer”, “product”, “employee”, “asset”, etc. This need arises from the fact that databases do not provide a means to use such concepts to give uniform meaning to data, because real world concepts such as “customer”, “product”, etc. are usually contained in several tables and columns or even multiple databases which are inaccessible to non-technical data consumers.
