Forget about WOLPHA Search in True Knowledge
2009 May 18
Ok, for a moment lets forget about over hyped release of WOLPHA, and have a look on recently released True Knowledge (TK) Application Platform which allows users to retrieve answers to their questions. For example you can ask the question What is water? and in response True Knowledge will provide an answer which says “Water, a common chemical substance that is essential for the survival of all known forms of life“.
Lets frame our question in a different way and ask What is H2O? and in return it provides several interpretations for the question asked and let you select what exactly you are looking for, and “Water, a common chemical substance that is essential for the survival of all known forms of life” is one of the TK translations for question asked. Questions asked through browser interface are translated into TK query language via natural language translation. Similarly a question What is Cadmium’s atomic number? returns “48″ or try to ask something like What is Gandhi’s birthdate?.
In the core of the TK is the knowledge base which contains more than 130 million facts about more than 4.5 million objects, classes, attributes and relations. New facts can be inferred using knowledge generators with help of existing facts in knowledge base, other inferred facts or by extending knowledge base by feeding external knowledge. If you request something which it does not know, for example What is a triplet codon?, it will ask user to add knowledge about that object.
Users can ask questions through a browser interface or they can use True Knowledge API services: “Direct Answer API” and “Query API”. User can add additional knowledge either via the browser interface, or import in volume from different sources such as Freebase using API service. Most importantly
A key design decision is that all components are extendable by users. In addition to users adding facts, they can also extend the questions that can be translated into whole new areas and even provide new inference rules (and even executable code for steps that involve calculation) for the Knowledge Generator.
Unlike other platforms those currently lack an API, True Knowledge’s use of an open API offers advantage to their search technology. Direct Answer API and the Query API allow HTTP requests and provide responses in XML. Also
The Query API allows developers to bypass True Knowledge’s natural language translation system and directly query True Knowledge’s knowledge base using a simple query language. This allows automated systems such as web and mobile applications to tap into True Knowledge’s vast machine-understandable knowledge of the world, making them behave more intelligently.
At first glance True Knowledge does not look as attractive as one can think about Wolfram|Alpha, but an open API, ability to extend all components including knowledge base certaintly makes it more powerful.
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What does it answer if you ask:
- ‘how do I conquer the world?’
- ‘which are the genes related to cancer?’
?
Well it will answer, something like
“It sounds like conquer the world/genes related to cancer may be an object that I don’t know about yet. You can teach TK “
Interesting, very interesting. TK API implements REST protocol and does it suggests any thing about Linked Data or Semantic web which is not very clear.
That is what it will say, but I am sure it knows very well how to conquer the world and it has a secret plan to it
.
Anyway, thanks for the article, it is very interesting.
Many years ago people at Ask.com already tried to introduce the concept of natural language queries, and maybe answers.com represented another step forward. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you to start reading here:
- http://www.searchlores.org/london/lea2tra.htm
Anyway, a query on a search engine represents a bad experiment, because it is not reproducible. I hope people won’t start using these to do research, at least not as it has been suggested in some places.
Forget about WOLPHA Search in True Knowledge: Ok, for a moment lets forget about over hyped release of WOLPHA, a.. http://tinyurl.com/obua2r