I'm sure a few of you may have heard about Wolfram Alpha. It's kind of like a cross between a search engine and Math Cad, but clearly a very cool on-demand system that I believe brings business intelligence to the people.
"Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.."
The best way to demonstrate the value is to just type in your name, say "Dave" assumes that this is a given name, and shows me the number of "Dave"s born over the last 100 years or so. See the figure.
Also, the expected total number of “Dave”s alive today, population fraction, and expected rank.
Estimates for current US population:
Very cool.
Okay, how about
something a bit more complex, such as the mean distribution of a data set.
Plot:
Log-linear
plot:
Total:
Of course, this is not a BI application using your business data, but there are some clear BI applications with this system. Moreover, it’s not
thousands of dollars in BI software that’s required to access this very sophisticated system.
Give it a try.
I awaited the arrival of WolfRamAlpha with great anticipation ! The promise of intuitive data results sounded almost too good to be true. Unfortunately, I found that many of my searches yielded nothing. It appears that this system is only good for queries within its narrow scope of expertise. Within that scope, it returns fascinating information, sometimes useful, many times trivial. This information is entertaining, and great fodder for cocktail party conversations. As far as being useful, in the sense that the added information advanced my seach goals, I find that WolfRam Alpha still has a long way to go. My hope is that this site, so rich in promise but still weak in useful results, is a work in progress that will evolve into a truly useful tool.