Alpha can then tell the user useful facts about the nature of water under such conditions, including density, molecular weight, and boiling point. Heavily symbolic and mathematical queries are interpreted and computed even more handily: "water 550C 3 atm," another sample search Wolfram demonstrated, becomes the substance water at 550° centigrade and at "3 atmospheres" of pressure. With all that power, the engine can interpret keywords such as weather and oakland into meaningful categories by way of "input interpretation." The term "weather" remains weather, but the term "oakland" is interpreted to mean "Oakland, California" by default, according to rules set by the program. Wolfram Alpha relies on the data sets it has acquired (much of which are freely available from governments and public domain sources) and computers in data centers maintained by Wolfram Research. My testing since its debut on May 15 bears this out. Screen shots from the demo show an easy and intuitive interface that converts queries such as "weather oakland" into current and historical weather data for Oakland, Calif. Despite a sketchy webcast (the event was so popular that the Berkman folks ran out of bandwidth), Wolfram's demo has been widely blogged and linked to online. Stephen Wolfram demonstrated the new engine at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School ( ) on April 28. Think about it as a library minus the disdain for skateboarders plus Wolfram's Mathematica program powering the world's biggest online scientific calculator. Wolfram Alpha is the latest big project from Wolfram Research, Inc. Marketed as a computational knowledge engine, it boils down to being a really smart way to access most of the best reference shelves on the planet. Search engines still matter, but Wolfram Alpha ( hopes to shift us toward a "finding engine" that uses Web 3.0 principles to deliver information from natural language queries. Biology Digest/Physical Sciences Digest.The Information Advisor's Guide to Internet Research.Library Leaders Digital Strategy Summit.
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