Until the 1980s, databases were viewed as computer systems that stored record-oriented and business data such as manufacturing inventories, bank records, and sales transactions.
A database system was not expected to merge numeric data with text, images, or multimedia information, nor was it expected to automatically notice patterns in the data it stored.
In the late 1980s the concept of an intelligent database was put forward as a system that manages information (rather than data) in a way that appears natural to users and which goes beyond simple record keeping.
The term was introduced in 1989 by the book Intelligent Databases by Kamran Parsaye, Mark Chignell, Setrag Khoshafian and Harry Wong.
The user interface uses hypermedia in a form that uniformly manages text, images and numeric data.