Fact and/or generic knowledge storage

Question

How can generic facts be stored in a database such as '3 injured in Kansas fire' or 'Spain wins 2010 Worldcup'? The end result would be to have some table(s) where if multiple entries for people being injured or multiple entries for sports scores - data could be queried/totaled.

desired query would be to see how many injuries have occurred in a date range.

Answer 1

An interesting question, I think - I'd imagine some form of bayesian-filter-style-thing could come in useful for fabricating certain metrics such as the positiveness of the fact (injured => bad, fire => probably bad) => bad, (wins => good, worldcup => big) => "big good" :)

Answer 2

For generic fact storage, RDF is probably your best bet. It was designed for just that sort of thing. There are a bunch of different ways to store triples, the easiest of which are probably just XML or N3 text files.