wolframalpha

A few years ago, a good friend gave me a nice little present: 5 kilos of dead tree in the form of Stephen Wolfram’s “A new kind of science”. I never read it cover to cover and merely scanned a few pages with lots of pretty pictures before deciding that this wasn’t really my cup of tea. I also read a bit some of the criticism on this book from the scientific community. I’m way out of my league there so, no comments from be except a few observations:

Anyway, the same Stephen Wolfram has for years been providing the #1 mathematical software IDE: Mathematica, which is one of the most popular software tools for anyone involved with mathematics. I’m not a mathematician and haven’t touched such tools in over 10 years now (dabbled a bit with linear algebra in college) but as far as I know, his company and product have a pretty solid reputation.

Now the same person has brought the approach he applied to his book and his solid reputation as a owner of Mathematica to the wonderful world of Web 2.0. Now that is something I know a thing or two about. Given the above I was initially quite sceptic when the first, pretty wild, rumors around wolframalpha started circulating. However, some hands on experience has just changed my mind. So here’s my verdict:

This stuff is great & revolutionary!

No it’s not Google. It’s not Wikipedia either. It’s not Semantic web either. Instead it’s a knowledge reasoning engine hooked up to some authoritative data sets. So, it’s not crawling the web. It’s not user editable and it is not relying on traditional Semantic web standards from e.g. W3C (though very likely it must be using similar technology).

This is the breakthrough that was needed. The semantic web community seems to be stuck in an endless loop pondering pointless standards, query formats, graph representations and generally rehashing computer science topics that have been studied for 40 years now without producing much viable business models or products. Wikipedia is nice but very chaotic and unstructured as well. The marriage of semantic web and wikipedia is obvious has been tried countless times and has so far not produced interesting results. Google is very good at searching through the chaos that is the current web but can be absolutely unhelpful with simple, fact based questions. Most fact based questions in Google return a wikipedia article as one of the links. Useful, but it doesn’t directly answer the question.

This is exactly the gap that wolframalpha fills. There’s many scientists and startups with the same ambition but Wolframalpha.com got to market first with a usable product that can answer a broad range of factual questions with knowledge imported into its system from trustworthy sources. It works beautifully for facts and knowledge it has and allows users to do two things:

So what’s next? Obviously, wolframalpha.com will have competition. However, their core asset seems to be their reasoning engine combined with the quite huge fact database which is to date unrivaled. Improvements in both areas will solidify their position as market leader. I predict that several owners of large bodies of authoritative information will be itching to be a part of this and partnership deals will be announced. Wolframalpha could easily evolve into a crucial tool for knowledge workers. So crucial even that they might want to pay for access to certain information.

Some more predictions: