Enterprise Wolfram Alpha

Nova Spivack of Twine has an interesting post (on Twine) introducing us to Stephan Wolfram's 'Wolfram Alpha'. This is really exciting news and I'm looking forward to get my hands on this new "answer engine".

I still have to think Spivak's post through to really understand what this means for the internet, for search and natural language processing. But, I have a question (for you) without having many answers to this question myself: Can this be used for the enterprise too? If answers to questions can truly be computed, can enterprise-specific questions also be answered using enterprise data (if needed, combined with external world knowledge/data)? Can questions as: why does this part have these specifications, why were they chosen?, be answered? If so, this could be very interesting for companies having loads of unstructured and structured information hanging out all over the place. Providing smart insights over this information using this engine could drastically improve corporate efficiency, support strategic decision making, etc.

I'd really like to hear what you think. Let's discuss it here (or on Twitter) and try to grasp the implications of Wolfram Alpha for the enterprise (-- without having seen it).

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Comments

  1. Hi Samuel,

    Good point. Not a lot of people have been thinking about this from the Enterprise point of view...except for the business development guys at Wolfram Science I suppose ;-)

    My thinking is that they way they curate knowledge is very interesting for business application the enterprise as you mention. It will allow you to model many of the things that executives are now modeling from business inteligence systems coupled to Excel models more effectively.

    Something like http://isontech.blogspot.com/2009/03/wolfram-alpha-answers-when-will-this.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your comment! And the pointer. Let's wait and see what Wolfram Alpha will bring and then try to translate it's use to the enterprise. Maybe Wolfram will do that for us!

    ReplyDelete

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