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Mathematica itself has a rich plugin (packages) model that extends it to particular domains. It's a very important part of the system, sort of like extensions make Firefox.

Perhaps they'll open Alpha up in a similar way to help make it comprehensive. Can you imagine how powerful this thing could become if third parties are also developing for it?

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There's a Q&A with press and someone asks this questions and Wolfram essentially says that yes they very much want third party participation, the only caveat being that there would be some manual review process of the data for accuracy.

So ultimately I think thats what this is like a Google Base + computation where they have added (hopefully) enough of the core to push it over the hill.

A place to put structured data where it can be fully leveraged minimal effort from the data provider.

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