Will Wolfram Language be always-online to have the latest datasets?

Question

In many videos about the Wolfram Language, they talk about how it knows a lot about "everything" and shows many examples i.e: in this video.

For the language to do this, will it need to be always able to get

• global populations;
• GDP;
• weather

to name a few?

I understand constants (pi, e, log, days/weeks/months in years etc) can be included but surely will the other datasets need to be downloaded on-demand or can they be cached?

Answer 1

Taken directly from their documentation:

The Wolfram System provides important functionality through accessing the internet. Most Wolfram Language functions that provide computable data operate by loading data over the internet. Some functions require real-time access to the internet; others update a local data repository by accessing the internet when required. The Wolfram Language also requires internet access when you explicitly use Import to read from a URL, or when you use web services. The Wolfram Language documentation system also supports automatic updating via the internet.

Reference: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/InternetConnectivity.html

Answer 2

You can always cache previous results, but they recommend against it since data is continually updated.

It's not omnipotent, so at some point you'll need an internet connection, and the data sets are too massive to be practically contained in the language itself.

Regarding caching recommendations:

From: http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/faqs.html

Can I cache the results from Wolfram|Alpha?

Caching is generally inadvisable with Wolfram|Alpha, both because data is continually updated and because a surprisingly large fraction of results depend on user location (not only directly through geography, but also through unit, currency, linguistic, and other conventions, as well as locally determined importance rankings of entities). The standard Wolfram|Alpha API contract does not allow caching.

Answer 3

Yes, the Wolfram Language will function identically to using Wolfram API calls within Mathematica. For mathematics/built-in functionality internet access needn't be necessary, but data requests obviously need an internet connection.