A new kind of science”, it’s interesting to speculate about how existing technology will interact with products like Wolfram Alpha in the future, as both inputs and outputs: But Wolfram Alpha is offering a much more intuitive and flexible interface (based on the screencam, at least).Īs Nigel James points out in his post “ The alpha computer. The basic premise reminds me of the early “ natural language query” pioneers of fifteen years ago, Business Objects’ own ill-fated “intelligent query” prototype a few years ago, or Semantra or EasyAsk today, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Google has started linking searches to charts. For example, if you ask for “MSFT vs SAP” it will give you financial comparisons, if you ask for “2 cups OJ” it will give you nutritional information, and if you ask “what is the gdp of france / italy”, it show you a chart of that ratio over time (see diagram below). You can type in a question and Wolfram Alpha will interpret it and return information relevant for a particular context.
It’s a “computational knowledge engine” that gathers information from databases on the web and makes it available through a streamlined and elegant interface. Wolfram|Alpha is a product from Wolfram Research (famous for its beautiful Mathematica software) that has been generating a lot of buzz. Wikipedia defines Web 3.0 as the “semantic web”, “making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” We’ll get a step closer to that vision when Wolfram|Alpha (or maybe just “WolframAlpha” – their web site uses both) launches later today.
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