Here’s how Watson works: The computer has been preloaded with information taken from encyclopedias, news articles and even the Internet. Other components include software that analyzes the question or clue and figures out what category — person, place or thing, for example— the clue is referring to, as well as software that can use the result of the clue analysis to generate a large number of candidate answers.
Rather than relying on preloaded databases that have been selected by human engineers with the anticipation that it will compete in a game of Jeopardy, I think it would be interesting to have a Watson clone start out "life" with a clean slate. Give it nothing but the sensory inputs and basic algorthms needed to interact with it's environment, and then let it learn experientially through classrooms, the internet, and human interactions. For example, when it gets an aswer wrong, it can learn from it's mistakes, gradually indexing and ranking it knowledge in terms of context and reliability.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho