Computing Work: Semantic Web True Knowledge Web Wolfram Alpha Work
by Rob
2 comments
Wolfram Alpha
A while ago wolfram research announced that they were developing Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that could answer questions on the internet. As this is exactly what we do at True Knowledge we were quite interested in how this all worked and how well it worked. Wolframs knowledge engine is written in mathmatica, a language that was developed at wolfram research whereas True Knowledge are using more standard languages, our core knowledge engine is written in C++ and runs on reletively tame comodity hardware whereas wolfram uses some serious kit - as can be seen on YouTube.
Wolfram Alpha has been getting a lot of publicity recently - helped in part due to its founder Stephen Wolfram - and most of it has been encouraging for them and the space in general. Their lauch on Friday was hit with a few snags but they seem to have got the system up and running - well I’ve been able to give it a try anyway. From my experience it seems to be pretty good at factual based questions such as how old/what is but it hasn’t been able to ask any questions that involve an extra step of reasoning over working out what was in the question - apart from obvious cases. That happens to be one of the very things that the True Knowledge system is very good at for example try the ‘Who was prime minister when micheal schumacher was a teenager’ question that I had in my True Knowledge API lauch post, the wolfram page for that is still spinning three minutes later. When they do give a response it does tend to have lots of information about the answer rather than a simple answer though. For example try ‘Halstead uk’, you get the population, weather information etc…
One of the main differences is the fact that you can’t add information or knowledge to Wolfram, True Knowledge builds on user generated content, much like wikipedia, this means that when it can’t answer but does understand, it can let you add the required information and then the question can be answered, whoever asks.
Give them both a try and see what you think!
Good Hunting
True Knowledge goes live with its API
True Knowledge unveiled its API last week to anyone who wants to try it out. This means that anybody out there wanting to ask general questions of the web and get direct answers is in luck. The release got a reasonable amount of coverage in the so called ‘blogosphere’ with articles on GigaOm, webworker, ZDNet and Venture Beat which was good for us as almost all the coverage was positive. Recently with the speculation surrounding wolfram alpha we’ve been getting a bit more interest in the area that we’re working in which is also good news for us.
I’ve been working at True Knowledge for 15 months now and we’ve moved the product forward in many different ways but this is quite a milestone as it means we’re open to the public and we’re starting to get real usage through our public API. We still have a lot of work before us but we’re getting there! We’re all hard at work still on the system amongst other things we’re trying to make it faster and improve the APIs capabilities at the same time. True Knowledge is also still one of the few companies out there in the UK still hiring at the moment so if you’re interested get over to the jobs page. At True Knowledge I work on the C++ backend which actually does the knowledge processing, this is the heart of the technology and our team is working hard on parallelisation and scaling at the moment to make the system even faster. We’ve got loads of ideas of how to make the technology better and we’re trying to find the time to get them all done - if you’ve got any ideas of ways to make the system better then get in touch with the True Knowledge community, there’s the forums on the main site at www.trueknowledge.com along with blogs and a facebook group, there’s even a twitter feed if you’re into that so there’s no excuse.
As an example of the types of questions that you can ask of True Knowledge - try these out
Who was prime minister when Micheal Schumacher was a teenager?
Is Fernando Alonso older than Rob Stacey?
To help people out I’ve written a wordpress widget that can be added to any wordpress blog (the current version can be seen on this page) it lets your users ask true knowledge questions. It’s only at version 0.2 at the moment but hopefully I can improve it over the next few weeks, comments welcome!
Good Hunting