Stephen Wolfram is blogging about one of his latest projects: WolframAlpha.com, which he describes as a natural language query front end to a knowledge system written with Wolfram Research’s Mathematica engine. There aren’t many specifics at this time, but I presume its goal is to provide answers to reference-like questions.
There appear to be a couple of objectives here. One is to provide a natural language interface to queries. Another is to encode knowledge not in webpages, but in an organized fashion that computers can analyze. These goals makes sense for a certain class of “search” queries that I’m calling reference queries. Reference queries are queries that look for specfic pieces of factual information–information that may even change over time, such as “Who is the president of the United States?” However, at this time it’s a bit difficult to tell exactly what queries the WolframAlpha system will work best with.
Stephen expects WolframAlpha to go live in May. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out.
[Found via Nova Spivack]