Patent ID: 7146536

Claim:
A system, comprising: a fact repository configured to receive and store static facts about a product configuration, wherein the static facts are organized into a standard pattern and used in evaluating one or more checks, wherein the one or more checks comprises a rule section, wherein the rule section comprises a rule formatted according to a rule language to detect a product issue, wherein the one or more checks further comprises a remediation section with information to address the product issue; a knowledge automation engine configured to receive the one or more checks and one or more facts, wherein the knowledge automation engine is further configured to automatically evaluate the one or more checks against the one or more facts to determine if any product issues specified by the one or more checks exists for the product configuration, wherein the one or more facts received by the knowledge automation engine are stored in the standard pattern in the fact repository; and a fact collector configured to extract a fact in a raw format from an input source, wherein the fact collector is configured to organize the extracted fact from the raw format into the standard pattern recognizable by the knowledge automation engine, wherein the fact collector sends the extracted fact to the knowledge automation engine in response to the knowledge automation engine not finding the fact needed to evaluate one or more checks in the fact repository and sending a query to the fact collector for the fact needed to evaluate the one or more checks.