On 10/07/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Damned if I wasn't thinking about this sort
of thing a couple hours
> ago while washing up...the vision I had was a device in the home which
> would respond to queries, so one could ask, "Wikipedia, how long is
> the Great Wall of China", and get an audible response within a
> reasonable response time.
> That is more or less the extent of the thought, and while there are a
> lot of questions and issues to be resolved around it, I see no reason
> it couldn't become a reality within a few years.
SemanticWiki would be a key feature in making that
idea a reality.
Parsing the plain text articles can only provide very limited data for
answering such questions.
Infoboxes and so forth are very popular on en:wp - Google already uses
{{coord}} like this, but the other infoboxes are a pretty good source
of this sort of parseable data. Note that infoboxes are not entirely
consistent as yet.
- d.