Knowledge-based language is the new buzzword in IT. In the words of Stephen Wolfram, he defines knowledge-based language as “a language where a vast amount of knowledge on how to do computation and the world is built into the language.”
I took a look at the whole 12 minutes video and from an events marketing perspective, a few thoughts on how it could transform the events industry immediately came to mind. Here are a couple of thoughts and ideas on how knowledge-based programming can bring about a whole new experience to events.
1) Identifying Relevant Network Connections as Target Audience
I know which attendee is on Facebook and who in their Facebook network are potential attendees
Zoom forward to 1:26 of the video and basically, it explains that the datasets allow me to know who is on Facebook and their network, and ask questions about the network. For example, Tom is an attendee for a Digital Marketing Conference that I am organizing. I could be querying on the dataset of who in Tom’s Facebook network works in a digital marketing function. Based on this query, I could then marry this to a custom campaign, where I ask Tom to invite his friends in Facebook to join him for this specific Digital Marketing Conference.
A possible intelligent query for an email campaign could look like this:
Subject: Hi {{contact name}}, invite {{friend.a.contact name}}, {{friend.b.contact name}} to Digital Marketing Conference 2015
The names would be queried from Facebook based on the datasets delivered by Wolfram Language, based on an API to be made available by Wolfram Language (if they eventually release this API). Think mail-merge for emails but to global data-sets outside of what you store in your core database.
2) Knowing when to execute my wet weather programme
Suppose I am holding an outdoor event, and there is a contingency plan which takes 10 minutes to execute to move my event attendees to an indoor arena. So when do I know when to execute my wet weather programme?
Using knowledge-based programming (zoom in to 2:16 mark of the video), I can do a query where I can compute by minutes when the rain would come based on a specific geographic location, mapped to data from a local meteorological station. This could be integrated to a mobile app, which will then alert me on when to execute my wet weather programme.
Of course, the above are just a couple of examples and while Wolfram language is already 30 years in the making and yet to be officially launched, it’s always exciting to know what technology can do for events, and how it can enhance the quality of event execution by event planners.
