Wolfram|Alpha: Simple and Not So Simple Computations in One Click, by Africa S Hands, FUMSI (Jul)
Information professional Africa Hands provides a very full review of Wolfram Alpha, describing its scope and ways to use it.
"The data in Wolfram|Alpha is organised so that it may be used in computations, not just searched and found. Wolfram|Alpha is a powerful warehouse of knowledge that makes data useful through its computational abilities. Wolfram|Alpha produces more than the end result; it gives historical data, tables, timelines and charts to make sense of the data. As a computation engine, it answers specific questions about objective facts rather than general information queries, and produces results only about publicly available information."
This is a very specialized tool - can't just throw keywords at it - but for those who persist it has value, as the writer points out, for the everyday user and the librarian or researcher.
"It offers the everyday web user access to quantitative, peer-reviewed data in a format not available by general purpose search engines. For researchers and librarians, Wolfram|Alpha is a valuable ready-reference tool providing high-level sources for additional information."
Posted by Gwen at July 21, 2010 10:24 AM