According to the Guardian, Wolfram will be opening its curated data to be queried via an application programming interface, or API. Currently, you can view results in a browser, export them as a PDF, or "play" them using a Mathematica plug-in. The ability to use the data on other sites and for other means, such as computations in spreadsheets, is appealing, if not earth-shattering.
Wolfram's launch fanfare was followed by much confusion about what Wolfram actually is. One thing that's clear is that the service has an impressive amount of data. What's not clear is if and when it will ever make money.
APIs are at least a good start in relation to monetization--holding the Alpha data captive within its site meant that it would never go beyond its own traffic, a recipe for disappointment and counter to the link economy that has been built around sites like Twitter.
In today's socialized Internet, APIs to your data are the barrier (or door) to getting users hooked on your data. Regardless of whether through an API that controls a cloud service like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), or the ability to get communications in and out of Facebook, users want to consume data in the way they feel most comfortable. Any company that creates or aggregates data needs to make it available, if it expects to ever hit critical mass.
CNET News' Tom Krazit recently wrote about a licensing deal between Microsoft's Bing "decision engine" and Wolfram Alpha (two non-search engines join up to create a super search engine?) that "allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates."
If Microsoft is serious about taking on Google's geek factor, and asserting its dominant position in spreadsheets and higher education as Bing grows, then the data from Wolfram adds a new dimension. From the consumer perspective, the more informed the data is, the better, but both Bing and Alpha have a long way to go to catch up to Google.
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Mathematica lets users perform a wide variety of mathematical calculations and visualize results.
(Credit: Wolfram Research)Mathematica, Wolfram Research's sophisticated software for complicated mathematical calculations and visualization, is going online.
The O'Reilly School of Technology announced Wednesday a licensing deal with Wolfram that will let it create an online version of Mathematica called Hilbert that "will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity."
The software will be available to students in the second half of the year, O'Reilly said. Hilbert will be available through the O'Reilly School of Technology, an online education division of publisher O'Reilly Media.
Going one step further in fulfilling some of the potential of online software, Hilbert will also enable users to create "mashups" that combine the Mathematica abilities with other online work through courses including NetMath at the University of Illinois, said Scott Gray, director of the O'Reilly School of Technology, in a statement.
(Hilbert is named after the German mathematician David Hilbert. Alas, O'Reilly made no mention of an online Mathematica environment being called Hilbert space.)
O'Reilly said it will put an online interface onto Mathematica using Ajax software, a leading example of "rich Internet application" technology that's increasingly popular for building more polished, elaborate, and interactive Web pages.
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