John F. Sowa wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Following is Wolfram's summary of the project:
>
> http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/
>
> Following is a testimonial by someone who has had hands-on
> experience in testing Wolfram Alpha and was unable to make
> it fail:
>
>
>http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google
>
> As the title indicates, the author, Nova Spivack, thinks it could be
> as important as Google.
>
> Following is another comment on Ars Technica:
>
>
>http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/03/stephen-wolfram-and-the-techno-dianetics-of-google-ology.ars
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> John Sowa
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
> Relationship to the Semantic Web
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
>
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>
Very simple question: What happens when I don't ask my question in English ? (01)
-- (02)
Regards, (03)
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com (04)
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