Information technology or IT, has transformed society and will continue to do so in the future. A simple, but cogent, definition of dental informatics is “the application of computer and information science to improve dental practice, research, education and management,” Dental informatics (DI) is a relatively new field that has significant potential for supporting clinical care. It is a young scientific discipline that is undergoing continual maturation. Its main purpose was to develop strategies for how bio medical informatics can most productively contribute to the resolution of dental research problems. Most dentists are unaware of what dental informatics is, what its goals are, what it has ach ieved and how they can get involved in it. It is mainly concerned with collecting, storing, and retrieving data from large databases. This article attempts to review the evolution and progress of dental informatics as a specialty and its applications in dental practice. This review delineates informatics from information technology and explains the types of scientific questions that dental and other informaticians typically explore. Scientific investigation in informatics centres primarily on model formulation, system development, system implementation, and the study of effects. Informatics draws its scientific methods mainly from information science, computer science, cognitive science, and telecommunications. Dental informatics has lead to numerous applications that improve dental practice,research and management. DI shares many types of research questions and methods with its parent discipline,biomedical informatics and Tele-dentistry. However, there are indications that certain research questions in dental informatics require novel solutions that have not yet been developed in other informatics fields. 

Keywords: Bioinformatics; Databases; Dental informatics; Oral pathology.