Numberspace. It’s not really about search

With all the recent buzz around Wolfram Alpha and Bing, its no surprise that our “public numberspace” struck a chord as a searchable open repository for quantities.  We’ve enjoyed a fair amount of coverage from CNET to Ars Technica and Technology Review.  We’ve read comments and consternation on SlashDot about the meaning of searching for numbers on Alpha or Bing or TRUE# but the good news in our minds is that the idea of numbers as a key datatype to help us understand content is clearly resonating. 

But searching on 3.14 to find PI , or building the world’s largest data bank of numbers, while they might concievably happen on a site like ours, are not really why we’re here.   Truenumbers are more akin to RSS than they are to Bing or Alpha.  As RSS does for a news item, a truenumber is  intended to provide just enough tagging to make numerical facts more amenable to processing than are raw text and digits. 

A numberspace is a special repository and associated services for creating, storing, organizing and using truenumbers.  We really hope that organizations from publishers to academic departments to engineering enterprises deploy numberspaces for keeping, and keeping track of the many numbers that their work entails and produces. 

Truenumbers and numberspaces help find and keep track on what versions of which numbers are floating around and being used, correctly or incorrectly.  Just formatting the darn things properly, and having the right, validated units are valuable benefits over plain-text numbers. So, while we are excited to be a part of the new wave of interest in new kinds of search, and the role of numbers in the semantic web, the marketplace will judge us by how well we improve engineering and other number-rich activities, one number at a time.

Language Machines

Before the “desktop metaphor” was concieved 1976 at Xerox PARC, computers were “language machines”.  Programmed using special command languages written in plain text, these pre-graphical computers could only report computational results back to the user as streams of text typed out on teletypewriters.   Interacting with a room full of large humming cabinets of electronics and flashing lights only through the teletype was an experience not unlike a seance communicating with another world.  The theory of formal grammars introduced in 1956 by linguist Noam Chomsky had a strong influence on the development of “computer linguistics” and vice-versa, reinforcing our perception of computers in terms of language.  UNIX machines emerged as the pinnacle of language-driven computing circa 1970, and though the fundamental gap between human language and computer language was as profound as it is now, people and machines before Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), it seems to me, had a deeper connection than mice and menus afford us now. 

 Today, HTML, XML, RSS and the merging of applications and content seem to be moving us back toward use of language in computers.  The tendency for use to use smaller more focused media like blogs, wikis, SMS and Twitter makes tags and other metadata more pervasive, and the computer more of a partner in our communications than it was when it merely filed traditional monolithic  documents.  In short, computers as language machines are coming back, and I think we will see many useful things result.

Units, Colors and Quantities

Like MAC vs. PC, units have always been an argument.  Système International d’Unités, or SI was introduced in France in 1960 as the end-all for that argument, and is universally accepted as the standard.  Picking a system of units is like picking a system of colors.  You can choose RGB, CMYK, LAB or many other color models, but in the end, its the picture that counts.  In other words, in practical applications, it doesn’t matter.  A unit is simply a named amount of something.  Foot or inch name particular amounts of length, a cup an amount of volume, and so forth.  The types of things being measured, like length or volume are called quantities by NIST.  Width is also a quantity, but considered to be a member of the quantity category length, and we can use any unit of length to measure height, thickness, etc.  Adding length to width makes sense if we’re calculating a perimiter,  but adding torque to energy has no sensible purpose.  Even so, in the SI system, torque and energy have the same units of kg*m²/s² which might mislead you to think that they could indeed be sensibly added. With any unit system, having the same units is a neccessary condidtion for carrying out addition, but clearly not a sufficient condition for that addition to be meaningful. In the end, its always the physics that matters! Systems of units reduce the hundreds of quantities we measure and work with down to fewer dimensions (7 in the SI) for convenience of calculation. But with computers handling most of our calculations today, we can think about doing them in a way that pays more attention to the physics, resulting in more useful software that supports engineering and science better. This is one of the areas we focus on at our company, True Engineering Technology.

The Measure of Things

Numbers are different things to different people.   Stats to sports fans, spreadsheets to businessfolk, deep and abstract concepts to the mathematician.   The spin here at the Numerator is that of engineering and science: numbers as representing the measure of things.  Measurements like “the inside diameter of the pipe is 2.5 in”.  There’s a lot of information packed into that little sentence, and still more if we include who said it, when, in what context and so forth.

We find it surprising that our computing platform offers no special support for numbers, they are just text and digits like the sentence above.  That is what our company is all about, providing pervasive support for numbers everywhere we encounter them.  Here in this blog, we’ll more concerned with the big picture.  How our computer platform is evolving before our eyes to be more semantic, more collaborative and social, and less dependent on heavy proprietary applications.

Most of all, we look forward to this blog allowing us to maintain a dialog with our customers, and with those interested in the future of technical computing in general.