Wolfram is developing CDF (Computable Document Format) to make static documents and books online more exciting and interactive.
The familiar portable document format, or PDF, created by Adobe, allows users to share reports and texts online but does not allow readers to interact or fiddle with the content presented to them.
Wolfram, speaking at Inspire, a technology conference in London, said that we needed to use technology tools to better illustrate information and let the reader actively drive the discovery of new information.
“We are trying to make a new active knowledge container. Something that in a sense has the narrative properties of documents which also allies to the interactivity of apps,” he said.
“I am not just talking about pre-formed content like a video – I am talking about something where you [the reader] are driving new discovery from a landscape set up by the author.”
By using CDFs to create digital textbooks or academic papers, students would be able to play around with graphs on a page, to actively see how their actions would affect the subject being discussed.
Wolfram used the example of a management report looking at hurricane insurance. If the author created the document using a CDF, they would be able to include charts with which readers could tweak to see what would happen to the return to insurers if factors such as capital investment varied.
He also said that the media could use CDFs to better illustrate their articles online, rather than a photo, which is a passive experience for the reader. If there was an article about a volcano erupting for instance, a CDF container could be used to showcase the different variables that needed to be in place for the volcano to erupt. Using a slider to change the variables, would be one way for an image to altered by a reader in real time.
Wolfram, who is spearheading a campaign for computers to be used to teach Maths in a more practical way in schools, told The Telegraph that CDFs have really great potential make information come alive for readers such as students.
“When you drive a car yourself, you learn the route better,” he explained. “This is what CDF is offering readers – the chance to drive the information in real time.”
He said CDFs would be available to users “very soon”, and that there would be different models through which to access the technology for a fee.
Wolfram, is the brother of Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist and former child prodigy who, in 1988, created the Mathematica computer program used by scientists, researchers and engineers to number-crunch huge volumes of complex data.
The company, which they run together, was best known for Mathematica until 2009, when it launched Wolfram Alpha, a new type of search engine, created to provide answers, not just search results.
Wolfram Alpha, which went live two years ago, was designed to provide clear answers to specific questions. For instance, a Google search, for, say, the nutritional values of a Big Mac returns 700,000 results which web users then have to sift through to find the facts they want. A similar search on Wolfram Alpha will, in theory, return a single answer, detailing the calories, fat content and salt levels in the McDonald’s burger.
That’s because Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the web for its answer, as Google does. Rather, it searches its own huge database of factual data to find the correct information.
Wolfram said the site and its components, such as specialist apps, were “doing well”, but there were no search market share figures he could share as the site was still very specialist.
“We don’t have a market share figure. It’s difficult to chart as Wolfram Alpha is doing well on some specialist areas, such as comparing geographical data and not being used in the same way to other search engines,” he said.
However, using the same organizing principles and technology as the search engine, the company has been taking the solution to businesses, and charging to organize their information in a computable way.
Wolfram said: “Computation has finally come of age… there is an information overload and we need computers to work harder to find the relevant answers for us.”