Wolfram Alpha: The Beginning of Web 3.0?
If we had to define the internet time line, most people would agree that web 1.0 was from roughly 1990 to 2000 and web 2.0 has gone from 2000 to today. If we are to assume that each web generation goes for about a decade, it means that new changes in the internet are on their way. But what changes? There are many theories on this, but one that has stood out among the others has been this idea of a ’semantic web’. The semantic web is essentially an internet system where not only people can communicate, but so can websites. What do I mean by websites ‘communicating’ with each other? I mean having two mutually exclusive sites that are able to transfer information without being set-up to do so (like having my facebook account being able to take data from my wordpress account without having to jump through some serious hoops). This currently isn’t easy to accomplish because the way the internet was set-up (If you have more questions on this, I would refer you to the semantic web wikipedia page).
We have seen a lot of progress connecting people to people (via social networks), but the dreams of the semantic web have not started to materialize themselves. That is until today, when wolframalpha.com was released. While this website isn’t the semantic web, it is the beginning of the transition (or, at the very least, the frame of thought). Wolframalpha.com works like a search engine in that you put in a query (say GDP of the United States) and produces a list of results. Where it’s different from a search engine is in the results it produces. While google gives you a list of websites you can go to in order to find your information, Wolfram Alpha gives you the data you need without transitioning to another website.
An explanation on how Wolfram Alpha works
This is taking the web to the next level, from searching to solving. While this system is by no means perfect (most of my queries got rejected by the system), it does lay down the framework the internet needs in order to evolve to the next level.
- Try out wolframalpha.com and see what you discover. What do you think needs to be improved?
Brian
I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha since it launched. It definitely isn’t a tool for those who fly by and get frustrated with the sometimes limited results. I like to look at it as a really primitive form of AI, and we are helping to build it. More useful possibly then Wikipedia in the future?
That and more, I think. It’s too limited right now for people to get the whole picture, but I can see something like this being more useful then wikipedia, google and facebook combined. At this point, it just needs to start adding capabilities.