Wolfram Research, the company behind the Wolfram Alpha search engine, has announced the Wolfram Connected Devices project, which aims to work with device manufacturers and the technical community to provide a definitive, curated source of systematic knowledge about connected devices.
At launch, the project had identified "a couple of thousand devices" from about 300 companies, and that number is expected to grow rapidly. Devices currently identified range from exercise measuring devices and satnavs to spectrometers and dishwashers.
For each device in the database, standardised information is collected such as size, form factor, price range and operating system.
The database forms part of the company’s long-term strategy, which company founder Stephen Wolfram describes in a blog post as "injecting sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything". He explains that the goal "is not just to deal with information about devices, but actually be able to connect to the devices, and get data from them—and then do all sorts of things with that data."
The larger strategy includes the Wolfram Data Framework (WDF); the development of the Wolfram Data Repository that will enable researchers to use WDF to publish data in computable form; and the Wolfram Data Science Platform, which can be used to visualise and analyse data.
Wolfram explains: "The goal is to get seamless integration of as many kinds of devices as possible. And the more kinds of devices we have, the more interesting things are going to get. Because it means we can connect to more and more aspects of the physical world, and be in a position to compute more and more about it."
More information here.