New Company Seeks to Bring Semantic Context To Numbers

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday August 10, 2009 @06:28AM from the quick-create-another-standards-body dept.

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."

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Reverse Engineering and Better Search by schnablebg · 2009-08-10 06:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.