Stephen Wolfram, who is an outstanding mathematician, built up
the Mathematica system, which is the premier mathematical computing
system available. His company has now produced a collection of
mathematical models (i.e, ontologies plus reasoning modules that
use Mathematica as their foundation) for a wide range of domains. (01)
In May, anybody will be able to ask it factual question that can
be answered by formal reasoning or computation from material
available on the WWW. (02)
Following is Wolfram's summary of the project: (03)
http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/ (04)
Following is a testimonial by someone who has had hands-on
experience in testing Wolfram Alpha and was unable to make
it fail: (05)
http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google (06)
As the title indicates, the author, Nova Spivack, thinks it could be
as important as Google. (07)
Following is another comment on Ars Technica: (08)
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/03/stephen-wolfram-and-the-techno-dianetics-of-google-ology.ars (09)
Following is an excerpt from Nova Spivack's note. I strongly
agree with it. In fact, I believe that this group must consider
Wolfram's approach to be a prime candidate for any system of
formal ontologies that might recommend, propose, or adopt. (010)
Note that I said *approach*, not the explicit content. I'm sure
that the current content of Wolfram Alpha is also valuable, but
the techniques they use for developing and using that content
should be considered as a basis for further developments. (011)
John Sowa
_____________________________________________________________________ (012)
Relationship to the Semantic Web (013)
During our discussion, after I tried and failed to poke holes in his
natural language parser for a while, we turned to the question of just
what this thing is, and how it relates to other approaches like the
Semantic Web. (014)
The first question was could (or even should) Wolfram Alpha be built
using the Semantic Web in some manner, rather than (or as well as) the
Mathematica engine it is currently built on. Is anything missed by not
building it with Semantic Web's languages (RDF, OWL, Sparql, etc.)? (015)
The answer is that there is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web
stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it
would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything
Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies and the
reasoning that they enable. It is just too wide a range of human
knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are too difficult to build and curate. (016)
It would of course at some point be beneficial to integrate with the
Semantic Web so that the knowledge in Wolfram Alpha could be accessed,
linked with, and reasoned with, by other semantic applications on the
Web, and perhaps to make it easier to pull knowledge in from outside as
well. Wolfram Alpha could probably play better with other Web services
in the future by providing RDF and OWL representations of it's
knowledge, via a SPARQL query interface -- the basic open standards of
the Semantic Web. However for the internal knowledge representation and
reasoning that takes places in Wolfram Alpha, OWL and RDF are not
required and it appears Wolfram has found a more pragmatic and efficient
representation of his own. (017)
I don't think he needs the Semantic Web INSIDE his engine, at least; it
seems to be doing just fine without it. This view is in fact not
different from the current mainstream approach to the Semantic Web -- as
one commenter on this article pointed out, "what you do in your database
is your business" -- the power of the Semantic Web is really for
knowledge linking and exchange -- for linking data and reasoning across
different databases. As Wolfram Alpha connects with the rest of the
"linked data Web," Wolfram Alpha could benefit from providing access to
its knowledge via OWL, RDF and Sparql. But that's off in the future. (018)
It is important to note that just like OpenCyc (which has taken decades
to build up a very broad knowledge base of common sense knowledge and
reasoning heuristics), Wolfram Alpha is also a centrally hand-curated
system. Somehow, perhaps just secretly but over a long period of time,
or perhaps due to some new formulation or methodology for rapid
knowledge-entry, Wolfram and his team have figured out a way to make the
process of building up a broad knowledge base about the world practical
where all others who have tried this have found it takes far longer than
expected. The task is gargantuan -- there is just so much diverse
knowledge in the world. Representing even a small area of it formally
turns out to be extremely difficult and time-consuming. (019)
It has generally not been considered feasible for any one group to
hand-curate all knowledge about every subject. The centralized
hand-curation of Wolfram Alpha is certainly more controllable,
manageable and efficient for a project of this scale and complexity. It
avoids problems of data quality and data-consistency. But it's also a
potential bottleneck and most certainly a cost-center. Yet it appears to
be a tradeoff that Wolfram can afford to make, and one worth making as
well, from what I could see. I don't yet know how Wolfram has managed to
assemble his knowledge base in less than a very long time, or even how
much knowledge he and his team have really added, but at first glance it
seems to be a large amount. I look forward to learning more about this
aspect of the project. (020)
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