What is a medical knowledge base?

A medical knowledge base is a set of structured pieces of information about medicine, sometimes referred to as “facts”. There are formal, complex knowledge bases that help to drive computing applications, but you may have seen a more common version in use when you visit the customer service section at your favorite online retailer’s website.

Knowledge bases are differentiated from databases in several ways. Whereas databases use tables and rows, knowledge bases are structured hierarchically around the topics that they cover. Databases can store data in typed columns, but those columns don’t have a relationship to one another. Knowledge bases are specifically designed to handle the kinds rich data interconnectedness that exist in the medical domain.