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Comment by dinkleberg | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool, I didn't realize SPARQL is pretty easy to work with.

I'm always curious though what people use services like this and wolfram alpha for beyond just playing around.

We have been using wikidata on pantheon.world to measure collective memory. In our case we start with all instances of human, trim the last to only the people with 15 or more language editions on Wikipedia and rank them based on an index. More info here: https://pantheon.world/data/faq

Thanks for sharing, that site is awesome.

Not sure if it counts as beyond playing around, but I used Wolfram Alpha quite a bit through school & university for checking my answers or how to do something I didn't have an answer for (it shows steps to get to solution, not just the solution) or to play around with parameters to get a better understanding of something - 'what if..' - pretty useful. More useful and easier to use than the TI Nspire CX CAS (I think) that I had, briefly, for that reason.

I imagine voice assistants use similar services to answer questions. Siri uses Wolfram Alpha. Alexa appears to use a number of different backends.

Well, XKCD seemed to use Wolfram Alpha when Mathematica fell over: https://what-if.xkcd.com/62/

> While researching this article, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests.

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