Making data computable

NPR: WolframAlpha, the website developed by the British-born scientist Stephen Wolfram, is billed as a computational knowledge engine. The search engine that is brimming with data can answer all sorts of questions. Wolfram, who has a background in mathematics and physics, says the concept is to take the systematic knowledge accumulated in the history of civilization and try and make it computable. "One of the things we're trying to do is to get it so that if science, engineering have made it possible to compute something, we want to make it easy to compute something for anybody," he says.