May 16 2009
WolframAlpha
It’s been a wet and windy day here today in Highland, perfect for searching the web for new and exciting tools. Through Twitter’s trending topics I saw that #wolframalpha was top, I thought it was a new kind of film out or something so didn’t really give it much time, but checked it out later and WOW, discovered www.wolframalpha.com
This site isn’t a search engine, askjeeves or wikipedia as we know them, but a really clever and smart site to answer virtually anything! I discovered just by entering my birthdate that I’m 13631 days old. This site has loads of potential for Health and Wellbeing / Technologies education. Give it go!
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
One response so far
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I’ve been quite taken by Wolfram Alpha’s way of working, too, Louise, although I think it has a long way to go before its underlying data sets match up to its power for accuracy, timeliness, depth and spread.
It’s still heavily US focused in terms of the data it mines – it would be good to see this knowledge base extended worldwide as soon as possible (try inputting England, then input Scotland and see the difference). I wonder though if that might be its biggest problem – all that data will have to be gathered, configured, maintained and updated by the team that is running the show. I wonder if that is simply too big a task now for any one team, however big, to run, given the sheer volume of digital data that now exists – see the Guardian at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion
Unless they can automate the process to some extent, as Google does, or go down a user-generated model, as Wikipedia does, I’m not sure it will prove useful in the long term.
Now, a partnership between Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia – that would be something to consider! Think of WA as an additional front-end to Wikipedia – could be interesting?
All those days, huh? I, apparently, passed my 19,000th day just 11 days ago! It’s funny to think how little I really know after 19,000 days of learning…….. :-)