Wolfram|Alpha: A Computational Knowledge Engine

Abstract

Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009. Wolfram Alpha is almost more of an engineering accomplishment than a scientific one — Wolfram has broken down the set of factual questions we might ask, and the computational models and data necessary for answering them, into basic building blocks — a kind of basic language for knowledge computing if you will. Then, with these building blocks in hand his system is able to compute with them — to break down questions into the basic building blocks and computations necessary to answer them, and then to actually build up computations and compute the answers on the fly. Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and infers answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. With Mathematica running in the background, it is suited to answer mathematical questions. The answer usually presents a human- readable solution.