There was incredible buzz beginning back in March about the impending debut of a new type of search tool. Wolfram|Alpha was billed in the popular press as the next coming of Google.

The project, according to one article, “combines natural language processing with machine understanding. You'll be able to get succinct answers to questions like ‘When was Google's stock at $300 per share?’ or ‘How much did it snow in New England last year?’ Allegedly.”

Say What?
That sounded good to me. But when I go to the site and pose a question in my natural language, I’m apt to get this response: “Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.”

Apparently that’s not unusual. According to a recent blog by Wolfram Research CEO Steven Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, “Close to half the time that Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t give a result, it’s not because it doesn’t have the necessary knowledge, or can’t do the necessary computation. It’s because it doesn’t understand what’s being asked.”

The Web is a great tool that’s changed all our lives, yet it can also be frustrating to use.

New Class of Tools
The semantic web was supposed to change all that. As articulated by Tim Berners-Lee and associates in a 2001 Scientific American article, The Semantic Web “will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.”

Last year, Sir Tim conceded that article “was, I think, too sci-fi.... it was looking too far into the future. It imagined the Semantic Web was deployed, and then people had made all kinds of fairly AI-like systems which run on top of that.”

It may be that the future is not too much farther off. In our Expert’s POV this week, David Ferrucci, who manages IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration Department, provides some insight into IBM’s DeepQA project, another effort aimed at advancing the state of machine understanding with AI and natural language processing.

Semantics and Process
It’s tempting sometimes to play the cynic and overplay the sci-fi aspects of such efforts. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the business outcomes. In the area of business process management, for example, efforts are underway to combine business process modeling and execution with semantic technologies, noted a summary of the AAAI’s Spring 2008 Symposia.  “In particular, the concept of semantic web services promises a new level of agility in process execution where AI can contribute insights and technologies from knowledge representation, reasoning and planning.”

And besides, there’s always The Singularity to look forward to.