Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

You’ve heard of the Book of Love – now there’s also a Book of Odds.

Don’t take out your betting cards yet. Rather than being a tool to help you get lucky on the next horse race, Book of Odds is about providing the odds of everyday life. It defines itself as an ever-expanding semantic database of probabilities that helps users find unexpected links between odds statements – the odds of a man over 50 being diagnosed with heart disease is about the same as the odds that an adult is afraid of snakes (1 in 1.9x).

Launched in mid-October, the site claims to contain hundreds of thousands of carefully researched Odds Statements, each evaluated and graded for its underlying data quality. The site uses Cambridge Semantics’ semantic middleware technology to structure the data to help users in their searches for odds statement matches. Currently the site has four topic portals – Health & Illness, Accidents & Death, Relationships & Society, and Daily Life & Activities, each with their own sub-topics.

Users can search by keywords, key-numbers (finding events of a given likelihood through whole number searches), and visually. Semanticweb.com thought this presented lots of possibilities for whiling away a morning, so we thought we’d share with you some of the interesting odds we came across while perusing the site. Check them out on the jump, right below the screen shot of the Book of Odds home page.

Searching on dates in Relationships & Society, we learned there is a:

▏ One in 6.37 odds that a male MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game – and yes, we did have to look that up) player has ever physically dated someone he met through an MMORPG.

▏ Interestingly, it’s a one in 18.61 odds that a female MMORPG player has done the same. As with other data, you can share it, add it to your own book of odds list or buy a tee-shirt with the data custom-printed on it from its Zazzle online store – though not a very catchy one.

▏ We also were directed to editorial content produced by the site’s writers – one piece on STDs provided some perspective on how to determine if your new boyfriend or girlfriend will be able to honestly tell you if they have something you don’t want to catch. It boils down, based on statistics and surveys, to something like this: Probably not.

Whole Number Searches

Searching on 15,150, we learned that there is a 1 in 15,150 odds that:

▏ A male born in 1970 in the U.S. is named Chance (not sure what the odds are that he hates his summer-of-love parents for giving him that name);

▏ A female born in 1920 is named Thomas (and we thought the hippie generation made all the weird choices);

▏ An employed person aged 16 or older in New York is a cementing or gluing machine operator or tender (which compares to an employed person of the same age in Kentucky being a textile cutting machine setter, operator or tender).

▏ There are also plenty of cancer/death stats, but let’s not go there…

Visual searches

Searching on the topic ‘food’, we were directed to a number of related topics through a visual diagram. From there we could click to various sub-topic threads to learn:

▏ The odds a person in Maine will die from choking on food in a year are 1 in 310,400 (you’ve got to watch out for those lobster claws…)

▏ The e odds a female 70 or older eats cake, a cookie, pastry, or pie at least once a day are 1 in 2.65 (not sure the odds are terribly different for those of us under that age range, but we’re trying!)

▏ You can dive out from a sub-topic thread to a completely different category. For instance, click on the circle hosting topics such as Vermont, and you’ll learn that the odds an employed person 16 or older in Vermont is a food service manager are 1 in 792.4. Click on the word Vermont and you’ll be bounced into a whole new thread that can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the odds that an employed person in that state is a medical equipment repairer or a dry cleaner worker – or that the odds of a Hispanic woman age 50 or older in the state having macular degeneration are 1 in 155.3.

Book of Odds is a fun place to explore – though by no means a complete one yet (no results for keyword or odds searches on bankruptcy, for example – and after the year we’ve had!). But the site does claim higher missions than mere diversion. It hopes to become an established new reference source, increase the general understanding of probability, increase tolerance for uncertainty, unleash the human capability to calibrate probability, and help with tough decisions. It says each odds statement it uses has to meet standards including clarity and explicit source naming, and accuracy through careful selection and evaluation of credible sources.

The site provides plenty of details on its mission and methodology, but there’s nothing wrong with just playing around – especially if you are an adult man aged 18 to 44, where the odds are 1 in 2.91 that you engage in some leisure-time activity.

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