I've a maturing idea regarding a knowledge store.
For the purposes of this question, the store would be used by a police force for the recording and querying of crimes. I believe that historically, police forces used to hold vast index card systems, allowing cross-correlation and querying.
The knowledge store would contain a collection of known facts, collated in a way that supports unknown future questions.
Obviously if I knew the future questions "how many crimes this month", "what tool is most commonly used for breaking and entering" it would be fairly straightforward to store, collate, and present the data.
My requirement for unknown future questions presents the problem.
I imagine a series of authors collating details of crimes. They'd submit details, making heavy use of relationships: "crime occurred in the evening", "burglar used a brick", "crime committed by Person_A". The when considering a crime, the user would enter "brick" and be presented with collated knowledge related to that concept.
- frequently used at night
- frequently used in opportunist burglary
- frequently used in in assault
- most common entry object used in Neighbourhood D
- most used object by Person_A, Person_B
The user would then browse/wander through the information set learning more about past crimes.
The underlying information store seems close to that in a Graph Database - but I don't want to "sleepwalk" into using one of those if there's a more natural, AI based solution that not only solves the storage/retrieval problem but which also provides expert-system style deductions.