This quickly becomes obvious when entering a question like, How much coal does it take to power a Prius for 50,000 miles and how does this compare to the CO2 output of a conventional Camry, or,“How is fuel consumption of a Boeing 777 with GE90 engines affected if the average ambient temperature of the planet falls 4 degrees centigrade?” This is the sort of thing the tool should actually be able to calculate, but only if the question is phrased in the dialect the system understands. Until I got the hang of it, I presented 42 queries to WolframAlpha without getting a single answer. Actually, “tolerate” is a bit of an overstatement. It doesn’t actually parse language and derive the meaning of questions, it merely tolerates a statement and picks words or symbols it understands. Initially I assumed that the interface was operating on natural language, but it does not. may be understood as words that are part of mathematical statements, but there is no representational framework (taxonomy and/or ontology) so that they can be understood across domains or (and this is a big problem, I think) accessed through other means than the WolframAlpha interface (more on this in a minute). Terms like velocity, weight, distance, country, airfoil, downforce, oxidative phosphorilization, etc. Instead, they are embedded in a knowledge domain and expressed in mathematical terms, so they are only understood in their own context. What is missing, though, is the essence of semantic technology, the meaning and relationships of things. What is new is the seemingly vast domain of knowledge that has been added in many areas. Therefore concepts like equations, infinite series, Fourier transforms, topological concepts, algorithms for solving mathematical constructs are all part of the foundation of the product. In essence, WolframAlpha is based on Wolfram’s previous (and extremely successful) product, Mathematica. The implications of this are rather severe (though in fairness we can expect the product to mature). There doesn’t appear to be a way to expand its knowledge base except via Wolfram Research’s “curating” process which is, presumably, only done by Wolfram Research. However, WolframAlpha is a product, not a data management tool. The way the knowledge domains seem to be developed does not appear to conform to what would be considered good data management practice in an enterprise today. In the lingo of data people, the data in WolframAlpha is hard-coded and proprietary, a horrifying prospect. Wolfram, for all his good intentions, has developed software for mathematicians, scientists and engineers, not enterprise applications and data management. This doesn’t really seem strange because Dr. There does not appear to be a taxonomy of terms linking them across knowledge domains. Having said that, I may be mistaken when I said “no underlying ontology” as there may be elements of ontology that I’m not aware of, but overall, it is not an application based on semantics. First and prominently, WolframAlpha does not rely on semantic technology, neither Semantic Web nor Linked Data concepts, and it possesses no underlying ontology driving its structure or information. But from the time I’ve spent, some things are already obvious. In fact, I’ve spent more time reading the hype about it than I have actually kicking the tires. I haven’t been formally trained on WolframAlpha nor have I thoroughly investigated it.
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