I just read some interesting commentary from some friends which compares what they’ve seen of Wolfram Alpha with True Knowledge so I re-visited the True Knowledge site. Clearly, TK has had a redesign as these two screenshots from 2008 and 2009 will show:

The soon-to-be-live-computation WA engine is launching with the same color scheme as the old TK site as well as Primal Fusion’s choice: faded orange.

In our WA compared with TK analysis, we should be aware of and note that systems are built in the mould of their creators and their pre-orientations / pre-dispositions / accumulated pasts. This helps us to contextualize the systems, what each can do and why they’re constructed in the way they have been and are being.

The background of founders can provide us with clues on likely development and strategy of the platform.

From what I can make out from WA’s video presentation, Wolfram’s solution takes its lead from Mathematica and other natural sciences databases. In essence, it’s like taking an online calculator that can generate visuals of trigonometric function graphs (like my Casio 5100FX did when I was a teenager) crossed with elements of:

* Bloomberg + MS Excel + SAS (Statistical Analysis Software) to generate economic charts

* some biochem modeling software

That’s why ‘Der Spiegel’ (http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,624065,00.html) can identify WA’s limitations in information availability/accuracy on politics, popular culture, sports etc. It’s not the natural or default orientation of Wolfram’s team, who spend more time thinking about Fibonnaci and Feynman than Britney or Barack which is what Tunstall-Pedoe’s team does. William Tunstall-Pedoe, the founder of TK, is from a journalistic background so his natural information orientation would be towards what’s published in most papers (politics, popular culture, business, sport, etc.) and that’s the direction he would most likely direct his team efforts towards.

In the greater schema of the Web, my observation is that WA’s launch reflects the trend of commercializing and hybridizing previously closed niche academia sources like Mathematica for the masses. We also see this when, for example, Google takes software that was in architectural niches (e.g., Autocad) and creates free tools like Sketch-up and now Google Draw.

Personally, I’m in favor of this trend. The question will still arise for WA, “How do we make money from our platform?” but they seem to have some cost per embed of a WA-generated search / graph in their business model.

With TK, another important distinction is that its wiki capabilities allow for collective correction. We read the definitions / links provided and we can apply our naturally accumulated knowledge to orientate and refine the definitions / links provided, according to our semantic (aka linguistic) interpretations.

With WA, there may be less scope for collective correction. How many people are going to use pen and paper to check that the integrals and statistics generated by WA are accurate?

In due course, Google will probably release something which is a 3rd way of both: wiki, visual knowledge representation and semantically-linked facts+figures. In fact, it already does in some form with Google Finance:

and now its recently announced Public Data Search capabilities:

Moreover, contrary to misconceptions (or rather lack of proper investigation by some quarters of the Semantic and journalistic space) Google is interested in and has been actively building teams with semantic knowhow for several years.

I wrote a lengthy, objective and well-researched article on this topic last year. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of posting this article on a certain SemWeb platform which I’d entrusted with the safekeeping / stewardship of my and my friends’ content on its public platform. Instead of reciprocally honoring that act of trust, said SemWeb platform’s coding was so awry and poorly architected that they deleted 8 months worth of our collaborative content, including that particular post examining Google’s interests in the semantic space.

Therefore, my hard work on the issue is lost indefinitely — despite the CEO’s non-performance of his own promise to restore our content.

This is personally annoying since my article cast a contextual light on whether any of these Semantic offerings springing up are genuinely paradigm-shifters and “Google killers”. They cannot be Google killers if the basic assumptions about Google not being actively involved in utilizing Semantic knowhow and tools is either fundamentally wrong or flawed.

Alas, I cannot now reproduce that article and the links which I found about Google hiring teams from known Semantic Web-related techco’s like CYC. However, I can point to some articles from Read/Write/Web this January 2009 and from eweek.com in the same month which point towards Google having and progressively incorporating semantic search features:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_data.php

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_search/yes_google_is_doing_semantic_search.html

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_and_semantic_web/google_ceo_hints_at_semantic_contextual_search.html

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161890/semantic_search_could_secure_googles_future.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/04/just-facts-fast.html

As I note, I wrote my article last year — May 2008 — several months before R/R/W or eweek did. That SemWeb platform, in their inconsiderate and wholesale deletion of users’ content, is responsible for my article not being available for others to use as a public and democratizing information source that would put into perspective whether any SemWeb offering is a paradigm-shifter or “Google killer”.

From what I’ve road-tested in the SemWeb space to-date, none of them are.

Google remains ahead of the curve both technically as well as the way in which they service and market to users. Certainly some of the businesses and their tools could be better integrated but, nonetheless, the key components remain technically more interesting than those offered by wannabe “Google killers” to-date.

Specifically wrt Wolfram Alpha, I’m sticking with my position as stated previously: I reserve proper assessment of it until I can plug+play it myself, objectively.

This is because all kinds of people have hyped WA or tried to make me believe that “Google doesn’t do semantic search” (their words) — despite me providing analysis which contradicts their convictions and competitive intelligence insights.

If I have a positive / negative perspective on Wolfram Alpha it will be based on my own independent and objective analysis (ok also humorous), and informed with previously accumulated, distilled and connected observations of the Semantic space rather than anyone else’s spin / misinformation / ignorance.

PERSONAL NOTE

I would never trust that SemWeb platform with my content again. At least on my own blog I know my information isn’t suddenly going to be deleted because of some irrational / small-minded / inconsistent / undemocratic whim of someone else.

Most importantly, I am not giving any licensing rights to the SemWeb platform over my content (original articles, images, comments, business models etc.) and their associated copyright for the SemWebco’s use or commercial exploitation. Frankly, their actions showed themselves to be unworthy of my trust and underlined how important it is to have ownership of your content and credit assignation for it.

Their Big Brother policies and breaches of user privacy were also not very appealing as a user-member.

All-in-all, I’m glad I don’t buy into that CEO (words and actions). He’s the same guy who insisted Google isn’t into semantic search, searching with Google is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” and who hypes up supposed “Google killers”. His radar’s way off.

Clearly, mine’s more perceptive, calibrated and spot on.

In this post I’m going to broadly cover how to adapt Bloomberg-esque stock trading graphs and transform them into the art auction world of the Christies and Sothebys, in an innovative way (which may make eBay seem anachronistic). Now, this is what a typical Bloomberg chart and an eBay auction format look like:

I’ve been using Bloomberg for well over a decade and, personally, I find Google Finance a much more intuitive and navigable layout:

GOOG is clearly attempting to take best-of-breed Adobe Flex, blogging software, dynamic RSS feeds and more to create a fusion portal for day/semi-professional traders and others interested in companies and their stocks. Google Finance is a great example of cross-pollination which works. Some of GOOG’s other properties have not quite managed to be fertilized in this way for monetization…………..yet, but the Google Finance team certainly know what they’re doing.

CROSS-POLLINATION IS GOOD

Actually, the more I see of these best-of-breed portals the happier I am.

One of the things which has interested me since childhood is how to adapt knowhow from one field and apply it to others. This, I believe, is how a person cross-trains their brain to anticipate and solve current and future problems. It’s how I’m going to think out what measures are needed to “technologically twain” Web 2.0 technologies with what is, currently, the closed and vaguely restrictive business that is the international art market.

THE MIND OF A CURIOUS CHILD

Before that, a wee bit about my personal journey and realization that everything is relative and related to everything else, that there is some Unified Grand Solution with components which are serendipitously synched with each other, and that each of our lives is about piecing our paths ahead — from a priori knowledge acquired, assimilated and attuned.

This forms our personal strategic approach: in life, in work, in play. In its optimal form it’s……….WISDOM.

THE ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF A CURIOUS CHILD

For me, playing team sports as a child wasn’t simply about the health benefits involved, which my parents encouraged, or to delay doing my homework. Extra-curricular activities meant I usually got home around eight o’clock, Mon-Fri and weekends were dedicated to Chinese school, so it’s a wonder I did any h/w in English school — much less got As for it! LOL.

Sport was principally about learning how each player is co-ordinated into an overall team strategy, the sequence of ball passing and tactical persuasion needed to move towards the understanding of team goals and then converting those hours of training into achieving collective objectives: win the game and bring honor to our school and sports teacher(s) or lose with good sportsmanship and try better next championship.

This translated in my young mind as, “How to get the best out of a collection of concepts: game technicalities and rules, people motivation and visual-spatial anticipation and flow of play.” Of and in themselves, people are also a “collection of concepts”, btw.

PUTTING CHILDHOOD LEARNING INTO ADULT PRACTICE

The childhood discipline of proactive perception and practice later helped me to grasp complex economics / mathematical / biochemical / physics concepts — like “How is this cross product related to the corollary on the preceding page?” and “What are the intermediate steps to get from an alcohol to a ketone?” and “In the Mundell-Fleming model, if the average savings increase by X%, how much will the government need to adjust base interest rates to ensure the liquidity of money point doesn’t migrate where it will affect inflation and its contingent wages?”

Very early on I grasped that the world must work according to some form of symbiotic strategy. This realization was partially due to my father teaching me how to play chess when I was 5, so I was exposed to the concept that every piece has a direct and indirect connection to another piece and it’s important to be able to see the entire landscape you’re playing on, all the binomials of possible moves and how specifically they’re inter-related. Chess is a complex game for a 5 year-old to grasp and I’d probably attribute it to helping me in ways well beyond being able to beat my father in the second game and thereafter.

It taught me that what are seemingly discrete pieces can be combined in a matrix of possible moves and that there are always more than one solution to arrive at a win (or a gracious lose and………learn from it!).

Additionally, the way my parents taught me about Nature’s cycles (wind, water, earth, fire) and how radicals in Chinese calligraphy can be transposed to create other (sometimes new) characters meant that I was given the assurance it’s good to cross-pollinate constructs if the end result is more holistic, functions more efficiently and is more readily understood than the individual parts.

Strategic thinking becomes a natural and organic personal process — as second nature as breathing — if a person trains their brain sufficiently and efficiently, and are open to improving from mistakes. I, unequivocally, believe that each piece of knowledge a person acquires in life isn’t supposed to be put into some kind of glass cabinet for posterity or to be used for ill and nor is it designed to be a static and isolated event.

It’s supposed to be systematically filtered, conjoined with other discrete pieces and metamorphosed into transposed meaning to produce implementable solutions for the greater good.

APPLYING INTELLIGENT INNOVATION

My business partner(s) and I have been going through my most recent iteration of the business model for Project ART. They’ve been somewhat surprised at how I’ve turned the constructs around. That’s what happens when you’re a trained corporate strategist and adopt approaches which are as creative as they are technical and financial. Somehow the component spheres can fission and fuse in a way which makes sense, generates revenue, rewards user-members and is do-able.

So what am I cooking in my code bunker? How about something like this…………