Deiter Bohn reports that Wolfram Alpha is now offering a “Pro” version of their data analysis services for just $4.99 a month: “The new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The ‘reports’ that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. [The Verge] sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of ‘making the world’s knowledge computable.’” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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The world’s waiting to see how IBM’s Watson will fare against past Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The battle of the brains – real and digital – takes place next week, and we here at The Semantic Web Blog will be keeping you up to date with coverage of the big event. (Yes, not all show recap blogs have to be about American Idol or Dancing With the Stars.)

The topic has, of course, been a hot one in the Semantic Web trenches. Heck, it’s been a hot one in the general press. Will the NLP, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, and deep analytics algorithms invested in this massively parallel QA system that counts terabytes of storage and thousands of POWER7 computing cores enable it to beat its human competitors to the buzzer with the right answer? As of this writing, some 54 percent of voters responding to a poll here thought Watson would emerge as the winner of the Jeopardy! IBM Grand Challenge. Rutter, who’s won more money on Jeopardy than anyone else, held 28 percent and Jennings, who went undefeated longer than any other contestant, was clocking in at 18 percent.

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Semantic Web Summit East Features Stephen Wolfram, Dennis Wisnosky, Martin … MarketWatch (press release) The Semantic Web Summit, November 16-17, 2010 at Hynes Convention Center in Boston, is dedicated to examining the business applications of semantic … and more »

Our team is hard at work going through the tens of thousands of comments, suggestions, and questions coming in about Wolfram|Alpha.

We thought you’d enjoy hearing Stephen Wolfram respond to some of this feedback directly.

We invite you to join us for a live webcast today, Thursday, June 4, at 4pm U.S. CDT (GMT -5 hours), as Stephen responds to some of the questions you’ve sent in.

Details about the live webcast and how you can participate are available in today’s Wolfram|Alpha blog post:
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/06/02/stephen-wolfram-to-answer-wolframalpha-questions-in-live-webcast/

 Wolfram Alpha has been launched and is available for the public to try. I sat down to play with it.

FIrstly (using the rare American adverb here – don’t be confused), you can’t expect Wolfram Alpha to act like Google. It is a new kind of search engine, as one should expect from Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is famously the inventor of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science.

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CNET News

Wolfram/Alpha’s demo: Search results meet analytics ZDNet Here’s what Wolfram said when asked about the semantic Web. “If the semantic Web turned out to be an overwhelming thing our job would have been much easier,” said Wolfram, who also noted that much of Wolfram/Alpha’s data isn’t available on the Web. … Wolfram Alpha shows itself in public guardian.co.uk [berkman] Stephen Wolfram – WolframAlpha.com SYS-CON Media (press release) all 22 news articles

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica, & Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Tuesday, April 28, 3:00 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
RSVP Required via the form below or on Facebook
This event will be webcast live at 3:00 pm ET.

There’s been great anticipation around Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious project to create a comprehensive "computational knowledge engine."  The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system, and a discussion of its underlying technology and implications.  Participants will include Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law.

Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.  As he said, it’s not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn’t be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo. 

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