 |
Scientific Data Sources
(NIST, CRC, CAS, Landolt–Börnstein, EcoWin, Knovel, Granta, ...)
Scientific data has traditionally been scattered across many disparate and often obscure sources—usually accessible only by web browser, and perhaps even only in print. Sometimes data will be "machine-readable," but even then it tends to come in incompatible formats with varied and conflicting conventions.
Mathematica defines a new approach to scientific data—making it broadly and systematically available for computation.
Building on its strengths in science and its experience with large mathematical data collections, Wolfram Research has embarked on a major interdisciplinary effort to curate a broad range of scientific data—and put it in a form directly suitable for systematic use in Mathematica. Load-on-demand technology, combined with uniform conventions and careful design, allows the data to be seamlessly integrated into Mathematica—and accessed as easily as mathematical functions.
Covering physical, chemical and astronomical data—as well as economic, demographic, geographic, financial and linguistic data—the expanding Mathematica data collection includes not just numerical values, but also computable text and graphics data, all immediately accessible for analysis, visualization or computation using all of Mathematica's capabilities.
Scientific Data Source Features in Mathematica:
- Molecular, physical and chemical properties of chemicals »
- Data on all known nuclear isotopes and subatomic particles »
- Data on planets, moons, stars and galaxies »
- Economic, demographic, geographic, etc. data on countries and groups »
- Semantic, grammatical and morphological properties of all English words »
- Current and historical financial data on stocks, funds, currencies, etc. »
- Data on polyhedra, graphs, knots, lattices and other mathematical structures »
Key Advantages of Mathematica as a Scientific Data Source:
- Uniform Mathematica language interface to all data
- Full interoperability and consistency between data
- All data systematically curated by subject experts
- Wolfram Research automated quality assurance of data
- Consistent uniform symbolic handling of missing data »
- Support for computable textual and graphical as well as numerical data
- Automatic precision information for numerical data
- Immediate access to computation, analysis and visualization tools
- Automatic load-on-demand data access, with optimized local caching
- All data automatically kept updated
Interoperability with Scientific Data Sources:
- Data from many leading sources is included in the Wolfram Research collection
- Automatic import of arbitrary data in over 100 formats »
- Live data extraction from HTML web pages »
- Built-in support for all standard database systems »
- Integration with Wolfram MathWorld for mathematical data
Interesting Tidbits:
- Authors of some the world's largest encyclopedic works are at Wolfram Research
- Wolfram Research has long maintained the world's largest mathematical functions website
See Also Analyses On:
Send a suggestion to the Mathematica analysis team