

The real value in Wolfram Alpha comes from how all this information can be organised and related. Wolfram Alpha will tell you where its data comes from in any response, but if it doesn't use a good range of sources then you may not get the full picture.Ī large database is just the start. After all, just one or two stories of inaccuracies in Wolfram Alpha would be enough to undermine its reputation.īut what if you're researching something where there's disagreement, like how dangerous it is to breath in second hand smoke, or the number of civilian casualties in Iraq in the past few years? Here the source is everything. This all seems rigorous enough, and you can certainly understand the need to be careful.

And after that it's verified by real-life experts (some on the Wolfram Alpha staff, some outside) to confirm that it all seems reliable. The data then goes through an automated procedure to clean and check it. This has produced some impressive results, the company doing special deals with the owners of proprietary databases that they believe are important, delivering access to information that wasn't previously available online. There's no general automatic input from the web here: instead Wolfram Alpha staff work with experts in different domains to decide which sources are the best. The first step comes in choosing sources. I need to create a density histogram (or heatmap, or 2D histogram) of the counts/occurrences z for each fixed couple of values values.STOCK INFO: Wolfram Alpha has extensive data on stocks and shares going back many yearsīut most data is input through a more complex, part automated, part manual system.

I have a Wolfram-Mathematica dataset with 2 columns named A and B and more than 10^9 rows.
