Wolfram|Alpha is cool and uses great, new technology to provide question-answer query capabilities. But, it still has a way to go. As Read-Write-Web pointed out in their post, "the areas where Alpha exceeds are in Mathematics, Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, and the Life Sciences." What is needed is to take this technology and use it with business vocabularies and their backing databases.
To do this, you first need the capture of the vocabularies (yes, I will get back to this in my postings :-) - and then mappings to the physical stores. Microsoft's EDM (Entity Data Model) and Entity Framework are a start in enabling the mappings. They allow you to define a conceptual model, a physical model and then map between the two - although they don't help you create the conceptual or physical models, are not focused on conceptual modeling, and are too focused on the physical structure of the data store. Specifically, some of the ideal mappings are not possible (at least the last time that I tried), and all the data and meta-data that I would like to capture about the conceptual model are not possible to do (without extensions). But, they exist, are usable today, and will definitely be improved.
Another cool thing is that EDM and the framework allow you to write queries in the conceptual model, that are then translated to the physical one and run against the store. Pretty neat. Now, let's put a better query capability up front (like Wolfram|Alpha) ....
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Wolfram|Alpha work has the advantage of pre-existing well defined rules and relationships within the subject domain of their focus. I believe their work will be useful in several aspects as the industry tackles the more difficult challenges of business vocabularies or conceptual / physical mapping & navigation.
ReplyDeleteSuccessful commercialization will hopefully draw more entrants into the semantic world.
French-based Pertimm is also doing some interesting work in their natural language search engines. Code is proprietary, but the common functions are much intuitive for the general user: http://www.pertimm.com/en/fonctions_communes.php
ReplyDeleteI agree that Wolfram|Alpha is/will be very useful - and there is much that you can do today "within the subject domain of their focus". That last phrase was really what my post was about.
ReplyDeleteI am very interested in seeing what can be accomplished with the Wolfram|Alpha APIs. I have started investigating this and will report back.
Thanks for the comments and the reference to Pertimm. I have to look into their work.