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

Reverse Engineering and Better Search

[schnablebg]

I have had this need when reverse engineering and debugging algorithms in software. There are magic numbers in the formulas and I have no idea what they mean.

Additionally, if something like this was rolled into a more generalized search algorithm, it could be used the other way around. Google could know, for example, that a paper with the number 58.44 a lot of times is probably about NaCl even if it is not mentioned explicitly.

Re:why

[steelfood]

You're right. Numbers are the abstract representation of a specific concept. Words are a specific representation of an abstract concept.

It doesn't make sense to search the other way. Sure, you can search for, say, 58.44 and get relatively few correct responses. However, what if you searched for 10? Or 1024? Then what's supposed to come up?

Numbers don't have any a priori meaning. They require context. Otherwise, they're just a meaningless abstraction. Context makes 1 and 12 different, or the same (inches in a foot). It doesn't make sense to compare 1 mol of NaCl with 12 light years. As human beings, we can imply context without explicitly stating it. But that doesn't mean we don't need context.

It's like the difference between mathematics and physics. Pure mathematics is not useful without an application to a physical problem (not to say that there's no purpose to development of pure mathematics).