ideas

while working intensively on my final project for financial engineering, I start to wonder of new questions as ideas for my future research and study:

- freemind software reminds me when data get large and people at lost, visualization can be extremely valuable. It's good to be able to brainstorm ideas down in a visual structure. It helps to organize ideas especially when working on long paper. So the questions are:
- how to encode and represent knowledge or rules in a knowledge base, ruled based system? format may be text, drawing, video... How to set up a mapping or a user customized meaningful correlation between these representations?

- how to visualize and solve abstract concepts visually?
- how to visually encode knowledge?

I don't have the answers for these questions now...because I'm busy working on this final project paper and have not thought out those questions yet! but I think sometimes it is important to come up and ask the right questions first...to drive direction for answer rather than looking for some random answer blindly...again...another question and ideas about the approach of problem solving...
- is it active questioning/asking driven? or is it "search"/answer driven? how to search if you dont know what to search for????