Monthly Archives: June 2009

As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new kid on the search block: Wolfram Alpha. Search is a bit of misnomer actually. Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine” and although it’s still early days, it does offer a powerful tool – and something notably different from Google. It’s definitely not a search engine.

Alpha’s main advantage is that it contains large amounts of curated data, codified in a robust manner that allows for “computation”. Reasoning might be a better word. If you enter a query like “GDP US vs. France“, it knows that you want to compare the GDP time series, whereas “GDP US / France” works out the ratio between the two values. In other words, Alpha is a demonstration of the potential of the semantic web. If all data is labeled and the relationships between types of data explained in an ontology, then computers can use this information to manipulate data and answer pretty complicated user queries: like “how many UK Premiership footballers come from home towns over 3000m altitude?” (why you’d want to do such a query is another, perhaps unanswerable, question).

At the moment, many of the Alpha datasets are incomplete and so you can only do limited queries. But since I work mainly on cities, I wanted to check what’s available on this topic.

Read more on Wolfram Alpha and cities…