{"id":2952,"date":"2009-05-16T15:18:06","date_gmt":"2009-05-16T19:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/?p=2952"},"modified":"2009-05-16T15:18:06","modified_gmt":"2009-05-16T19:18:06","slug":"wolfram-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/16\/wolfram-alpha.html","title":{"rendered":"Wolfram Alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/\"><strong>Wolfram|Alpha<\/strong><\/a> is a new type of internet resource that has just gone &#8220;live&#8221;.\u00a0 Many are calling it a new type of &#8220;search engine&#8221;, which it technically is, but it isn&#8217;t a search engine in the way we are used to envisioning one.\u00a0 Others are calling it an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twine.com\/item\/122tfm1pr-7j\/answer-engines-vs-search-engines\">&#8220;answer engine&#8221;<\/a>, which isn&#8217;t a bad description.\u00a0 Wolfram takes the user&#8217;s query and builds a response from a variety of resources that resembles what one might get from an almanac or or encyclopedic resource.\u00a0 Wolfram&#8217;s own <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/about.html\">&#8220;about&#8221;<\/a> page avoids any particular label.<\/p>\n<p>Right now it has a relatively limited set of resources.\u00a0 It does well with towns, states, people, movies, word definitions and many scientific questions in the areas of mathematics and chemistry (which is understandable considering that it was built using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolfram.com\/products\/mathematica\/index.html\">Mathematica<\/a> as the foundation.\u00a0 It doesn&#8217;t do well with music, books, television shows, and abstract concepts.\u00a0 Much of this has to do with the data sets and methodology that is in place, and I expect to see much greater depth and breadth represented as time goes on.<\/p>\n<p>I have spent a bit of time last night and this afternoon playing with it, and am fairly impressed.\u00a0 Try a few queries, and be sure to view the &#8220;Source Information&#8221; link at the bottom of the results.\u00a0 This provides a fairly generic listing of the resources used for that type of query.\u00a0 Not all of the sources were necessarily used for your particluar query, but were the sources from which the data was extracted.\u00a0 One can see that with the addition of additional resources, Wolfram could become powerful first step for research.<\/p>\n<p>Some sample queries:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=dekalb%2C+il\">DeKalb, Illinois<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=world+according+to+garp+movie\">World According to Garp (movie)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=world+according+to+garp+novel\">World According to Garp (novel)<\/a> [note that this one fails&#8230; no resources yet for literature]<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=heaviest+gas+element\">Heaviest Gas Element<\/a> [many variations of this don&#8217;t work, an example of syntax, I suppose]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and it doesn&#8217;t know quite how to handle leading articles, either:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=The+World+According+to+Garp+(movie)\">The World According to Garp (movie)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is going to be a great reference; it needs time to mature and for additional data sets to be included.\u00a0 This is certainly one place where the use of library cataloging information would be very, very beneficial.\u00a0 Imagine being able to connect the dots between books, authors, publication dates, settings\/locales, etc. and other data sets.<\/p>\n<p>There are many sources of data that are mostly silos waiting to be tapped, <a href=\"http:\/\/infochimps.org\/\">Infochimps.org<\/a> being one example.\u00a0 How quickly and effectively they are able to incorporate useful data will partly determine how successful this resource becomes.\u00a0 Improving their context recognition (i.e. figuring out what a person wants to know based on their typed input) is the other, perhaps harder, challenge.<\/p>\n<p>Other sources of commentary and information:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.resourceshelf.com\/2009\/05\/15\/fast-facts-anyone-a-brief-users-guide-to-wolframalpha\/\">Resource Shelf&#8217;s Brief Users Guide to Wolfram<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg20227075.600-ask-alpha-quizzing-the-worlds-first-answer-engine.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&amp;nsref=online-news\">Quizzing the World&#8217;s First Answer Engine<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/81703\/Question-the-Answers-Answer-the-questions\">MetaFilter&#8217;s entry, and resulting discussion\/commentary<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wolfram_Alpha\">Wikipedia&#8217;s Wolfram Alpha entry<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In closing, I like their nod to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=2001+a+space+odyssey\">2001, A Space Odyssey<\/a> in their load exceeded error screen:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2953\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/sorrydave.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2953\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-2953\" title=\"sorrydave\" src=\"http:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/sorrydave-300x120.png\" alt=\"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that...\" width=\"300\" height=\"120\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/sorrydave-300x120.png 300w, https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/sorrydave.png 441w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2953\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">I&#39;m sorry Dave, I&#39;m afraid I can&#39;t do that...<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of internet resource that has just gone &#8220;live&#8221;.\u00a0 Many are calling it a new type of &#8220;search engine&#8221;, which it technically is, but it isn&#8217;t a search engine in the way we are used to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/16\/wolfram-alpha.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2951,2952,2965,2966],"tags":[4533,3149,4536,4532,4537,3016,4882,4535,4534],"class_list":["post-2952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-databases","category-online-services","category-search","category-software","tag-answer-engine","tag-illinois","tag-infochimps","tag-internet-resource","tag-mathematica","tag-search-engine","tag-the-world-according-to-garp","tag-wolfram","tag-wolfram-alpha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSU5g-LC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}