Olympic Data in Wolfram|Alpha: Let the Games Begin

Since Wolfram|Alpha first launched, we’ve received countless queries about Olympic Games and medalists. The countdown has begun to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, February 12–28, and we are pleased to announce that we’ve added comprehensive Olympic data to Wolfram|Alpha. It can now answer dozens of different types of queries about every medalist and event from past Summer and Winter Olympic Games.

Let’s start with something basic: “Olympic medalists from France”.  The results lead off with a summary and plots of medals won by French medalists in each Olympic Games—all the way back to the first modern games in 1896. The last pod lets you dig further into the data, showing complete, detailed results by sport and event.

If you are interested only in a particular sport, you’ll be excited to see the results for a query like “Olympic swimming” Here we show ranked medal totals for every country that ever won an Olympic medal in any swimming event, plus details on individual medalists and results for each Olympic Games.

But these are the kind of simple questions that other sites can already answer without much difficulty. Things start to get much more “computable” when you try complex queries, like “how many olympic gold medals did canada win in 1988“; you can find this information in other Olympics references, but in most cases you’ll have to wade through several levels of links and menus to locate it.

Or if you can’t remember what events Michael Phelps won bronze medals for, Wolfram|Alpha can help jog your memory.

We’ve also been working on building more connections within Wolfram|Alpha, so our new Olympic results are also linked to biographical information on individuals: ask Wolfram|Alpha “who is allen iverson” and you’ll not only get basic biographical details, but also see that he was a member of the 2004 bronze-medal-winning U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team.

While we can’t predict the future, we can at least handle queries like “where will the 2016 olympics take place?”

As we count down to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, we invite you to explore Olympic history with Wolfram|Alpha.