{"id":12021,"date":"2009-05-15T11:18:44","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T10:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/here-comes-web-30-wolframalpha-launches-today.html"},"modified":"2009-05-15T11:18:44","modified_gmt":"2009-05-15T10:18:44","slug":"here-comes-web-30-wolframalpha-launches-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/here-comes-web-30-wolframalpha-launches-today.html","title":{"rendered":"Here Comes Web 3.0: Wolfram|Alpha Launches Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia defines<\/a> Web 3.0 as the \u201csemantic web\u201d, \u201cmaking it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.\u201d We\u2019ll get a step closer to that vision when Wolfram|Alpha<\/a> (or maybe just \u201cWolframAlpha\u201d \u2013 their web site uses both) launches later today.<\/p>\n

 \"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"image\" Wolfram|Alpha is a product from Wolfram Research<\/a> (famous for its beautiful Mathematica<\/a> software) that has been generating a lot of buzz<\/a>. It\u2019s a \u201ccomputational knowledge engine\u201d that gathers information from databases on the web and makes it available through a streamlined and elegant interface. You can type in a question and Wolfram Alpha will interpret it and return information relevant for a particular context. For example, if you ask for \u201cMSFT vs SAP\u201d it will give you financial comparisons, if you ask for \u201c2 cups OJ\u201d it will give you nutritional information, and if you ask \u201cwhat is the gdp of france \/ italy\u201d, it show you a chart of that ratio over time (see diagram below).<\/p>\n

\"image\" <\/p>\n

The basic premise reminds me of the early \u201cnatural language query<\/a>\u201d pioneers of fifteen years ago<\/a>, Business Objects\u2019 own ill-fated \u201cintelligent query\u201d prototype a few years ago, or Semantra<\/a> or EasyAsk<\/a> today, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Google has started linking searches to charts<\/a>. But Wolfram Alpha is offering a much more intuitive and flexible interface (based on the screencam<\/a>, at least). <\/p>\n

As Nigel James points out in his post \u201cThe alpha computer. A new kind of science<\/a>\u201d, it\u2019s interesting to speculate about how existing technology will interact with products like Wolfram Alpha in the future, as both inputs and outputs:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe have heard SAP executives recently talking about how 50 percent of all the worlds financial transactions end up in an SAP system.  What value could that offer as an input to a \u2018Computational Knowledge Engine?\u2019"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And of course you can use the results as a starting point for further analysis. A big part of the goal of BI is to \u201chelp you answer questions you didn\u2019t know you had\u201d. You want direct answers to some questions, but people will still want to be shown what correlated data exists, and be able to browse through it intuitively (the new SAP BusinessObjects Explorer<\/a> product excels at this).<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in an appropriate time zone (2 am Saturday morning for me, so I\u2019m not going to make it), you can connect and watch the live WolframAlpha launch broadcast<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, as a lapsed Brit (I left 20+ years ago), I have to say I love the bald heads, English accents and the low-key delivery (while still being very effective hype) \u2013 a welcome change from all those US-car-commercial-voiceovers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia defines Web 3.0 as the \u201csemantic web\u201d, \u201cmaking it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.\u201d We\u2019ll get a step closer to that vision when Wolfram|Alpha (or maybe just \u201cWolframAlpha\u201d \u2013 their web site uses both) launches later today.   Wolfram|Alpha is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6173,"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":[1],"tags":[204,206,476,756,911,958,1137,1143],"class_list":["post-12021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-business-intelligence","tag-business-objects","tag-explorer","tag-natural-language","tag-sap","tag-semantic-web","tag-web-30","tag-wolframalpha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/image5-1.jpg?fit=113%2C101&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-37T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}