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Re: Re: comments on Wolfram Alpha

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg100366] Re: [mg100335] Re: comments on Wolfram Alpha
• From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
• Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 06:41:50 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <gvtmjt$gjb$1@smc.vnet.net> <6744902.1243858301056.JavaMail.root@n11>

True, but then it loses any synergy from the Internet. It is just a natural
language connection between Mathematica and WRI curated sets of data. It's
good as a supercalculator, at questions about scientific data, and recent
stock prices, but poor at most other things until they fill in more data. In
my view it is not a true Internet application. The web just provides a
portal to a self-contained application.

At least, that is the way I see it. Does W|A ever access the Internet for
information between the time a user types a question and the time it
provides a response? Perhaps it accesses data on the web, but only sites
that WRI has curated and pre-linked to. This would only amount to other
people storing the data for them. And "curated" probably means they have
created a driver interface to get the data into Mathematica form and W|A.

The data is the weak link and it will probably involve A LOT OF WORK to get
a really good set of data "about the world" into usable form such that users
would be surprised and delighted with the response.


David Park
djmpark at comcast.net
http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/  



From: Sjoerd C. de Vries [mailto:sjoerd.c.devries at gmail.com] 


Alpha is NOT a search engine.