Wolfram/Alpha’s much anticipated public debut draws near. I was fortunate enough to recieve a preview of the service today and took the time to write this post hoping to share with my friends and readers a few of my thoughts about recent developments in this field and the progress of the Semantic Web in general for those who may be unfamilar with recent developments, the term or this new search engine. Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959 in London) is a British physicist, mathematician, and businessman known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, and computer algebra. Wolfram/Alpha’s formative backbone is Mathematica an earlier creation of Stephen Wolfram. He also prefers to call his newest creation a computational knowledge engine and it is unlike any of the search engines that the majority of us are familiar with.

Since this blog is about all things Key West. I chose to provide you with some search queries that are topical and related to our beloved Island. Even though Wolfram/Alpha is designed and presently optimized for more intellectual pursuits like mathematics, physics and science. These topical queries still provide impressive data when compared to traditional search indexes. I started with the query Key West.

This simple query gives the above screen shot and population and map data sets which can toggled to the metric system or a satellite view. Below the above screen shot the query also lists, current local time and current Weather which can also be toggled to show Weather history, approximate elevation and nearby cities. Including distance and population data. You can run city sets which which will provide the data as a comparison. You can also ask natural language questions like the distance between Key West and Hong Kong.

Wolfram/Alpha calculates distance and standard travel times for this comparative query.

The map data includes the fraction of the Earth’s circumference navigated by this route and finally an option to download the entire query as a PDF file. I have now had access to the search engine for about 16 hours. I have been running a number of the suggested examples and some of my own novel search strings past Wolfram/Alpha.

I am quite impressed with the results its obvious strengths are Science and Math and its output concerning food products is prodigious compared to the data that I normally consume. Which usually consists of looking at a few food labels on my visit to “Fausto’s Food Palace” here on the Island. The next search parameter I have chosen to include is our High School and City mascot and namesake the “Conch”.

The query gives you all of the animal kingdom classification data for our Strombus and the option to toggle to its food related data set.

In the interests of expediency and to prevent this from becoming a really long post. I will not include all of the screen shots of the nutritional and dietary data because it is quite expansive and includes daily value rankings for each Vitamin and Mineral. Drill downs on Caloric values, Carbohydrates, Fat and Fatty acids, Protein and Amino acids, Vitamins, Minerals, Sterols and physical properties. I did include the screen shot from highest nutrients compared to other foods since it may provide anecdotal evidence about what is unique in a Key West diet that has provided a competitive advantage to our Key West athletes. I am of course just kidding but, I did find the really high percentile rankings interesting. The percentile rankings for Magnesium, Vitamin E and Vitamin B12 if calculated as part of an IQ test would make this Island delicacy a genius.

There are a number of reviews that have been and are presently being written by Tech blogs about Wolfram/Alpha including coverage by my personal favorite Read Write Web. You can read Frederic Lardinois most recent post on this topic by Clicking Here.

Danny Sullivan from search engine land a highly regarded search engine authority has also covered Wolfram/Alpha extensively first with a post critical of its rollout methodology called “How to Overhype your Search Engine” Here. And then with a follow-up article titled Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” Which is Here.

It is hard not to notice one other feature of Wolfram/Alpha and it caused me to ponder the potential for further integration with similiar services and search providers. Many of the queries produce links to Wikipedia like this one.


Here is a comic strip which was posted yesterday on a FriendFeed comment thread started by Robert Scoble. He was apparently meeting with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and asked for input from FriendFeed. It is funny but, it also illustrates a point and really the potential of these new Semantic Utilities to change the way we search for information.

Computational Knowledge engines like Wolfram/Alpha will provide a great framework to Improve many existing data bases like Wikipedia. I can’t wait to see what third party developers create with the API.

If anyone has queries that they would like me to run between now and Wolfram/Alpha’s public launch. You can post it here on the blog or drop me an e-mail at keywestnews@gmail.com you can also find Key West News on FaceBook by Clicking Here and on FriendFeed Here.

EDIT: In response to Jack’s question, comments section of this post.

Here are additional screen shots about the source information linked to the “Conch” as a food query.

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