General applications of the knowledge base

This post presents some possible applications of the general knowledge base that can be built using information management methods described in the post Yet another idea of collaboratively edited knowledge base. Applications of the knowledge base constrained to products available on the market have been presented in the post Shopping advisor and other uses of knowledge base about products.

Similarly to the knowledge base about products, we can build a knowledge base on the following topics:

• information about shops – e.g. opening hours, available products
  Thanks to this information, the system will be able to answer the question: Where nearby can I buy windscreen wipers proper for my car? (exclude offers that are not optimal for me and show the most important details of optimal solutions if there are several such solutions, according to the criteria specified in my profile)
• information about services: hotels, restaurants, repairmen, taxis, rooms for short-term renting
  Examples of tasks: I want to rent a single room for several days that meets the criteria set in my profile, or I want to go to some place by bus, taxi, bike or using carpooling (use criteria set in my profile to propose a proper transport)
• information about individual people: who they are, what they can do, what they have, what they want, …
  Examples of tasks: Find people near me willing to start jogging, or Find a person near me able to fix a problem with the blinkers in my car (show estimated repair time, sort offers by price)
• information about things
  Example task: Check if someone has already reported the failure of traffic lights at an intersection. If not, report it; if yes, when is the repair scheduled?

The database could also contain information about many other objects/items/terms defined by users using the first, second, and third type of information (see figure 3 in the post Yet another idea of collaboratively edited knowledge base).

The knowledge base could also store variable data – for example GPS locations of buses, taxis, and private cars (carpooling). Normally, all previous information values would be stored in the knowledge base but it can be disabled when needed for performance reasons.

A knowledge base user should be able to subscribe to properties of objects/items/terms. The user will be notified if the subscribed property of an object is set to a certain value. Thanks to this, he could for example:

• find out how the story described in the media ends,
• instruct the system to automatically buy and deliver a book when it is published.