This makes a "computable" document quite different than a "print" document. The information isn't fixed but can be manipulated by the reader. Unlike static formats, CDFs are "as interactive as apps, yet as everyday as documents," say Wolfram. "Central to the concept are knowledge apps, interactive diagrams, or info apps - the live successors of traditional diagrams and infographics."

In a blog post describing the new format, Conrad Wolfram compares a "traditional" graphic explaining the Doppler Effect with what he calls a "knowledge app," a CDF-based graphic demonstrating the same thing. Using the latter, readers can adjust the variables - observer location, source frequency, initial velocity and time - in order to gain a better understanding of how the Doppler Effect works.

That idea of giving readers tools for better understanding dovetails with Wolfram's larger mission of supporting educational and scientific efforts. And Wolfram sees the CDF as being particularly useful in educational and scientific publications.

It isn't simply readers who are meant to benefit from having more interactive publications. Wolfram says that the CDF is also designed to make it easier for authors and publishers to create and incorporate these knowledge apps into documents, arguing that up until now, these sorts of things have often required a knowledge of programming. CDFs can be created using the Mathematica software, and Wolfram insists that building a knowledge app is as easy as writing a macro in Excel. (And Conrad Wolfram quips that he'd like to make authoring even easier so that "anyone who can make an Excel chart be able to make a CDF.")

Will the Format Be Widely Adopted?

While the CDF does open a lot of possibilities here, this new format is based on proprietary technology. It's not an open standard, and as O'Reilly Radar's Andy Oram notes, "I assume Wolfram will keep strict control over the format, which draws a lot from the Mathematica language, and I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer."

To experiment with the new Computable Document Format, you can visit the Wolfram website and see some examples and other use cases. These require the download of a Wolfram CDF Player.

As Wolfram told us, the most basic question he tried to answer when the company started development was simply to see if it was even possible to take all this data and make it computable. Now, a year later, his answer to that question is an emphatic "yes."

Wolfram, however, also acknowledged that right after the launch the user experience for first-time users wasn't necessarily ideal, as Wolfram Alpha didn't yet have data for a lot of knowledge domains. The choice at that point, he said, was to either delay the launch and get more data, or to release Wolfram Alpha and be able to learn how its users would use it, and then enhance the experience over time.

Wolfram says that today, most users are aware of the difference between a search engine and Wolfram Alpha, and the experience for first-time users has become far better. He stressed that the team (which consists of about 200 employees and 500 volunteers) is currently adding new data at an increasing pace. That's gotten easier as the team has learned how to import information from a large variety of knowledge domains and sub-specialties.

Getting the Data is Just 5% of the Work

Unlike Google, Wolfram thinks that the Web "isn't useful for getting raw data." Indeed, whenever the Wolfram Alpha team experimented with this, the data simply wasn't up to par. Instead, the company will continue to mostly work with data from primary sources. Getting this data, however, is only 5% of the work. The real difficulty is to understand how to compute this data and to understand how people talk about this data: What kind of questions do they ask? What are the alternate names for a specific chemical element? In addition, the Wolfram Alpha team and volunteers also check for anomalies in the data they receive. If there are major outliers, the team will track down more information to verify the original source.

Sadly, though, not all data is free and Wolfram Alpha has to pay if it wants to include some databases. To make Wolfram a viable business and still offer this data, the team is considering a subscription plan that will give paying users access to deeper datasets from subscription databases.

Challenge: Bringing Wolfram Alpha to More Users

The question now, however, is how to get more users and how to bring Wolfram Alpha to more users through more channels. As we noted earlier this year, the company's newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz thinks that the team's "number-one priority is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." To get to this point, they will soon release more and better tools for third-party developers who want to use the company's APIs to integrate Wolfram Alpha's functionality in their own sites and services. It's also worth noting that Wolfram Alpha now offers an appliance that companies can install behind their firewall to curate and compute their own data.

Looking Ahead: Analyzing Your Own Data, More Knowledge Domains, Programming with Natural Language Queries

Besides looking back, we also asked Wolfram about his plans for the future. In answering this question, he stressed that this new approach to computing is just getting started and it usually takes him about 10 years to develop his projects before he fully understands what's possible once this new paradigm has arrived.

For the near future, however, Wolfram hopes that Wolfram Alpha's users will be able to upload their own data and perform complex computations on this data and use Wolfram Alpha to find correlations within Alpha's vast database. The usage scenarios for this could include anything from analyzing sales data to doing personal analytics on data from devices like the Fitbit. In addition to uploading data, Wolfram Alpha will soon make it easier for users to download data to use in presentations.

Wolfram also wants to bring Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica closer together. One development that Wolfram is especially excited about is using Wolfram Alpha's ability to understand and compute natural language queries in order to create Mathematica programs. By building on this capability, Mathematica users may soon be able to write and manipulate their code using natural language queries just like in Wolfram Alpha.

Obviously, the team behind Wolfram Alpha will also continue to add more data across an every-growing number of knowledge domains. Today, for example, the team is launching real-time space weather data, 12 complete genomes and local maps, as well as numerous other knowledge domains related to math, biology, physics and geography.

The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray's best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. The e-book application integrates Wolfram's computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It's easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha's vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010.

As Wolfram Alpha's managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction.

Wolfram Alpha iPad App

Wolfram Alpha's newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves.

Why Did Wolfram Kill the Mobile Landing Page?

In our conversation, Schoeller Porter pointed out that this landing page was only meant to be a test, and traffic to the site had decreased to the point where the company simply decided to pull the plug.

It's not surprising that Porter would defend Wolfram's decision to shut down the mobile site as a traffic issue, and not as a ploy to sell more of the company's pricey mobile app. According to Porter, users can still choose to get a good mobile experience through the website and those users who need a mobile experience can always get the mobile app. Until now, though, the mobile landing page offered a happy medium between the regular desktop website and the mobile app.

Currently, the team wants to focus on enhancing the experience on the default website and the mobile app; Wolfram is also thinking about mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry.

Why Not Just Keep the Mobile Site Up?

One could argue, however, that it really wouldn't have cost Wolfram a lot of money or manpower to keep the mobile landing page up for the time being. The company also didn't help itself by killing the mobile site without any explanation on its blog. The fact that the mobile site now features a big add for the iPhone app only helped to fuel the speculation about Wolfram's intentions.

54,233 Bug Reports and Suggestions

Among other things, the team held true to its promise to make at least one code update per week and there have been over 50,000 manual changes to Alpha's data sets over the last three months. Since its launch, Alpha's codebase has also grown over 50%. The team added over 2 million lines of Mathematica code to the project in the last three months.

In addition, Wolfram has also steadily hired more developers to work on Alpha. As Stephen Wolfram points out (with the precision only an engineer could really appreciate) the team received over 54,233 bug reports and suggestions. 31,006 of these "are now in [the] implementation queue, boiled down to about 5800 to-do items." 3907 people so far heard that the bugs they reported have been fixed.

All of this, of course, means nothing if the "computational knowledge engine" doesn't return the right results. What is more important here than all the engineering data, is that Alpha's "fall-through rate" - that is, the number of queries that users entered that it simply couldn't understand - has now been reduced to about 10%.

This is still a pretty high number and there are still a lot of areas where Alpha just doesn't know enough yet, though according to Wolfram, a lot of the things that people want to know that Alpha doesn't know yet are on the company's to-do list.

Wolfram also mentions that the team plans to give users more options to get actively involved in the project. He did not go into any specifics, however.

Ready for School

As the fall semester is just around the corner and as Alpha's current users are most likely to be students and academics, it is good to see that development on Alpha moved ahead during the summer. Wolfram stresses that this is a long-term project and that the team is constantly adding new data sources and new ways to query these databases.

If you haven't used it yet, have a look at this "Chemistry 101" post on the Alpha blog for some inspiration.

The Wolfram Alpha team will also make the latest version of its updates available for a limited number of outside testers before it goes live. If you would like to become a test for Wolfram Alpha, you can sign up here.

Here is a more complete list of updates:

• Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
• More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. "US military vs. UK")
• Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. "germany gdp vs population")
• More complete handling of government positions (e.g. "chancellor", etc.)
• Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
• Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
• Additional subcountry regions (e.g. "Wales"); many more to come
• Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. "Iran time")
• City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
• Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for "Cyprus" and "Slovakia")
• Some additional historical events; many more to come
• Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. "2 or 3 aces")
• Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. "partitions of 47")
• Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. "ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2")
• Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
• Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
• Support for planet-to-planet distances and "nearest planet", etc.
• Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. "ergs vs. newtons")
• Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. "love apple")
• More mountains added, especially in Australia
• Support for many less-common given names (e.g. "zebulon")
• More "self-aware" questions answered (e.g. "how old are you")
• More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.

Are You Using Alpha?

When we first reviewed Wolfram Alpha in early May, we gave it a mixed review, based on how uneven its search results were when looking at some topics outside of the engineering and live sciences. Alpha got a lot of hype before and right after its launch, but things have been relatively quiet since then. According to Compete, which just uploaded its data for May today, Alpha had around 1.5 million unique visitors last month (as always, we recommend you take these numbers with a grain of salt). We will have to wait and see, of course, how many of these visitors just went to the site out of curiosity and how many will become loyal users.

Have you gone back to using Alpha after the initial release, or are you waiting for a better version to come around? Let us know in the comments.