I have some kind of object model and I need to filter and sort it's nodes for some kind of property. What kinds of automated systems exist to generate and select properties of the object model that correlate to what I want? (I'm intentionally being abstract and non-specific)

I'm thinking of a system that works kind of like spam filters or supervised classification systems in that given an example data set it identifies rules that find nodes of interest. However I'm looking for a more general system in that it shouldn't require any design time information about the object model. It should work equality well as a spam filter on e-mail, a bug finder on a code base, an interest filter in a newsgroup or bot accounts finder on a social networking site. As long as it can explore the object model via reflection and be given a set of "interesting" nodes, it should be able to find rules that will find more nodes like them.