Comments on: Wolfram Alpha: Second-Hand Impressions

By: manskj

manskj — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 09:56:58 +0000

Great stuff!

Hmm not sure but I doubt they are using any type of traditional semantic web technology. If you want to do something industrial NOW you would build it with mainstream sql and focus on scaleability and how to interface cellular automata algorythms with the NLP interface.

Some thoughts here: http://isontech.blogspot.com/2009/03/wolfram-alpha-answers-when-will-this.html

Best Regards,
Mans

By: Christopher

Christopher — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:06:05 +0000

This is slight heresy but I have been wondering for some time if RDF is the best method for storing large scale knowledge bases.

Now before I get flamed, I am a fan of RDF, I use it and OWL in my application and I think a lot of data is best stored/queried using RDF, I’m just not convinced large scale general knowledge can be effectively managed as triples.

As a comparison I’d really love to hear from anyone using Topic Maps or some other semantic structure for large scale knowledge bases.

We shall see, I hope my miss givings are wrong.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:58:18 +0000

I agree, it would be cheating to count inferences, so I assume the 10T facts are stored in some sense more meaningful than “For X in [1, 1T] 10X is not a prime.”

By: Huff

Huff — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:16:56 +0000

Are the derived facts stored in the knowledge base? How many facts in those 10 trillion are basic (could not be derived from the others) and how many are derived?

It seems like they could balloon that 10 trillion number by just adding more and more derived facts without changing the actual answers that the system could give.

By: Jason Adams

Jason Adams — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:38:27 +0000

It’s daunting when you consider that 10 trillion facts only buy you a toy. I hope the interface and analysis on top of that will evolve over time so that’s not the case.