Cool! Hey, a tip, and I think I mentioned this in the comment/feedback box on W|A as well:
For some reason, every time I need information that makes me think "hey this would be the typical thing I'd expect W|A to be able to answer, I've seen it answer a similar question before" it hardly ever works ...
And I think a lot of that is due to how most of the demos I've seen are somewhat USA-centered and W|A doesn't have the same data when I query it for a European (or other) country.
How does that work? Because when I use Google or DuckDuckGo and look for that nation's bureau of statistics, fact sheet, even Wikipedia, the numbers are right there. Why is that? I thought W|A is supposed to index the calculatable knowledge for me so I don't have to search for it but instead can just run calculations with it?
Or does W|A just import complete available datasets and does not scrape the web for such data (even when it's in tabular form on an official government or university site)?
In which case, please get some more of those from non-US sources. Loads of governments opened up their data sources:
http://ckan.org/ <-- Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, Canada or are you using this one already? It's CC-BY-3.0 so there's no reason not to.
For some reason, every time I need information that makes me think "hey this would be the typical thing I'd expect W|A to be able to answer, I've seen it answer a similar question before" it hardly ever works ...
And I think a lot of that is due to how most of the demos I've seen are somewhat USA-centered and W|A doesn't have the same data when I query it for a European (or other) country.
How does that work? Because when I use Google or DuckDuckGo and look for that nation's bureau of statistics, fact sheet, even Wikipedia, the numbers are right there. Why is that? I thought W|A is supposed to index the calculatable knowledge for me so I don't have to search for it but instead can just run calculations with it?
Or does W|A just import complete available datasets and does not scrape the web for such data (even when it's in tabular form on an official government or university site)?
In which case, please get some more of those from non-US sources. Loads of governments opened up their data sources:
http://ckan.org/ <-- Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, Canada or are you using this one already? It's CC-BY-3.0 so there's no reason not to.