Nova Spivack interviews Wolfram Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith | The Semantic Web | ZDNet.com

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June 17th, 2009

Nova Spivack interviews Wolfram Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith

Radar Networks attracted a fair degree of attention with their roll-out of Twine , and the company’s CEO has built a reputation as one of the more thoughtful thinkers in the space. Nova took to the stage at the Semantic Technology Conference today, not to talk about his own company or ideas, but to lead a conversation with Russell Foltz-Smith from Wolfram Research.

Wolfram Research, of course, is the company behind the recently launched Wolfram Alpha ; a ‘computational knowledge engine’ that attracted a wave of attention that reached into the mainstream media.

“Putting all of the world’s computable knowledge; it sounds impossible… or over-confident, maybe. What is computable knowledge?”

“It’s ’systematic knowledge.’ It can be compared, contrasted, correlated, computed on. It’s not a movie review. Examples are classical physics, financial data and models, weather data and models… It’s not the latest opinion on who Britney Spears is dating. We don’t have a model to do anything with that in our system.”

Nova asks if it’s the difference between objective and subjective… Alpha deals with objective information. ‘Facts,’ almost?

Nova asks about sources, pointing to the example of Tibet ; is it a ‘fact’ that Tibet that is part of China, or not… ?

“In the case of geo-political things, and religious things, we have to make choices… and allow the community to let us know whether they agree or not…” Couldn’t the system represent multiple views, tied to the diverse sources? Could we not show the different opinions, and allow the user to make informed decisions themselves?

Nova; “is the world’s computable knowledge infinite?”

Russell; “the foundation of computable knowledge is likely to be finite… The amount of knowledge that can be computed and generated from that is infinite…”

Nova; “I can see ...

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=306

http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=306