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Without seeing a demo, it's hard to say anything factual - but in principle, the "problem" in any well-design/near-perfect system is still human beings. (conte
by hendler 18y ago
Without seeing a demo, it's hard to say anything factual - but in principle, the "problem" in any well-design/near-perfect system is still human beings. (context, language, HCI, "true", "news" etc) So while it is possible that Wolfram Alpha has successfully modeled a completely new area of search/information modeling - more likely, WA is another novel way parse language and information.
Also, Freebase and Wikipedia might the competitors (I agree with Nova Spivak) - but Wolphram Alpha won't be a panacea until it's open source data/technology. The wisdom of the crowds is the only way to model... the wisdom of crowds.
- dtunkelang 18y agoActually, they're not really about natural language--that's what I'm trying to get across in my post. They're more about a place to store and use structured data and access it formally. That they have an NLP interface right now is, in my mind, a kludge. And they aren't taking an open source / wisdom of crowd approach. Rather, they are taking a very retro curated data approach, more Britannica than Wikipedia. I'm a huge Wikipedia fan (see my recent post reacting harshly to Nick Carr's calling Wikipedia a "Potemkinpedia"), so my reaction was highly skeptical. But, for objective data like the populations of countries and atomic weights of elements, curated works just fine. In fact, for structured data, I suspect curated is probably the way to go.