WolframAlpha ...
what is it? As its own website states:
Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge
immediately computable and accessible to everyone.
We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
If you are like me, you are scratching your head about both
what it can do for you and why should you as a genealogist care!
WolframAlpha itself tries to give us a sense of this via a few
posted genealogy
examples
where relationships are computed.
- Were their names common at that
time?
- What happened on their
birthdays?
- What was the weather like on
your grandparents' wedding day?
- What were the towns they lived
in like, including demographics, and how far are they from where you live?
- What was 20 dollars worth the
year your great-grandmother was born?
- What is the technical
relationship between you and your grandfather's sister?
Fortunately for us, two genealogy bloggers have tried to
better illustrate what we, as genealogists and family historians, might do with
it.
I will be honest and say that I sorta see the potential and
yet my first, second and third thought is that there are other previously
available tools created within our own community that I would use to compute
relationships, assess the value of money, and/or that I might consult to
determine a birth date based on death date and age-at-death details, etc. Though, there is always value to having such
tools aggregated.
And, are there other ways that
something like WolframAlpha might be used to help us in our family research
quest?
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