New Company Seeks to Bring Semantic Context To Numbers

A new company, True#, is seeking to bring extensive semantic context to numbers to give them obvious meanings just as certain words have obvious meanings to most readers. "Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words — look it up — doesn't work so conveniently for numbers. Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer 'Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS'). Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words."

Comments

Sig Figs

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the accepted weight is 58.443 thats why Bing didn't show any NaCl results.

First you need a semantic context

[davidwr]

Search58.44 and chemistry and you'll find what you are looking for a lot faster.

This will be much more useful if it allows for approximate numbers and widely-used but inaccurate numbers. "1.4 math" should return 7/5, sqrt(2), and a bunch of other things. "3.142857 and math" should return "22/7" and "approximate value of pi" and probably a lot more.

Seems to work just fine

[gt6062b]

I'll bite.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mole+of+sodium+chloride+in+grams - seems to work just fine searching for "mole of sodium chloride in grams" and also works without the "in grams".

http://www.bing.com/search?q=mole+of+sodium+chloride+in+grams - works for Bing too.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=sodium+chloride+molecular+weight - also works.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=58.44+science - "58.44 science" 6th one down. Better results from google.

Why would anyone just type in a number and expect it to know that you want the molecular weight of NaCl? If you add a little bit of context to your search, it magically works.

Google Works Fine

[shma]

Their example fails because they chose a number that has no significance on its own without including a unit of measurement. If you search 58.44 grams, instead of just the number, you get plenty of relevant results. And look at what happens if you take a famous unitless number from chemistry and do a google search. Again, plenty of good results.You can try it with the speed of light as well. A search for 3x10^8 yields nothing, but 3x10^8 m/s gives you the Wikipedia page for Speed Of Light. And as far as I can tell, Google gives you good results for useful numbers in Mathematics like the golden ratio. So I don't see what the problem is.

Re:Works for me

[Verdatum]

I get a hit discussing "Which hot moms wear their teen's jeans!"

mole

[AliasMarlowe]

If the search term includes "mole" as well as "58.44", the first few pages of google results are almost all for stoichiometry of NaCl. Nuff said, Google works.

Re:This is really stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not computers, we know semantic context, and need numbers. Not the other way around.

Often, when studying a system of some kind, you encounter seemingly "random" constants. For instance suppose you kept getting the number 1.618 as the ratio between two quantities. Instead of dismissing this, you might actually look up this number and find that it's extremely close to the Golden Ratio. That would probably cause you to spend a lot more effort examining the system to figure out why this interesting constant is appearing in your measurements.

I'm not sure I understand your argument that somebody who wants the mol-weight of NaCl would not type in the value 58.44. Of course they wouldn't -- what they know is 58.44, and what they need to find out is what this number means.

Suppose you are measuring noise on a transmission line and you find an interesting band of noise at some particular central frequency. Maybe this noise is generated by some physical phenomenon that somebody in the world has already studied. Plugging this frequency into a search engine might be a good way to find out what's going on and get you a long way toward solving your shielding issues.

Sounds like the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences

[OfficeSupplySamurai]

This sounds a lot like the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

That site labels and stores integer sequences for easy lookup, and will let you simply search for a subsequence to find the one you're looking for. This proposed site keeps track of numbers instead and incorporates more than the pure math that the sequence encyclopedia limits itself to, but it sounds very similar in concept.

Re:Web searches aren't THAT bad...

[haifastudent]

And when web searches fail to find what you need, Wikipedia often has you covered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/58.44

There are a few similar things out there

[John Sokol]

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/ This is huge.

http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Real-Numbers-J-Borwein/dp/0534128408 A Dictionary of Real Numbers (Hardcover)

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual quote:

âoeThere is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.â

Re:Web searches aren't THAT bad...

[camperdave]

I fail to see any results relating to a mole of sodium chloride, in grams.

Really? This entry is about halfway down the first page:

# Stoichiometry frac 2.00 \mbox g NaCl 58.44 \mbox g NaCl mol^-1 0.034 \ \text mol In the above example, when written out in fraction form, the units of ... 17 KB (2309 words) - 17:37, 10 July 2009