Knowledge retrieval seeks to return information in a structured form, consistent with human cognitive processes as opposed to simple lists of data items.
It draws on a range of fields including epistemology (theory of knowledge), cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, logic and inference, machine learning and knowledge discovery, linguistics, and information technology.
In the field of retrieval systems, established approaches include: Both approaches require a user to read and analyze often long lists of data sets or documents in order to extract meaning.
The goal of knowledge retrieval systems is to reduce the burden of those processes by improved search and representation.
From computer science perspective, a logic framework concentrating on fuzziness of knowledge queries has been proposed and investigated in detail.