Using Wolfram's Computable Document Format (CDF), users can create visual depictions of their data sets, which then can be manipulated by others. "It is a new way to communicate the world's quantitative ideas much more richly than we have in the past," said Conrad Wolfram, the company's managing director, in a webcast press conference.

CDF gives viewers not only the raw data sets, but also the algorithms that form the relationships among the different data sets, which then can be harnessed to show how these data sets interact. The company has posted a number of demonstrations of the .

CDF could be used to embed interactive data sets in digital textbooks, scientific papers, business presentations and other electronic formats, Wolfram said. Today, such documents visually summarize information with charts, graphs, diagrams and other static depictions. By using computational power, the presenter could make these presentations more dynamic, giving viewers a way to manipulate the elements by using a set of controls that would accompany the depictions.

"We don't need to have readers uncompress the ideas," Wolfram said, referring to how a content author must "compress" his or her ideas into an easy-to-understand visual depiction, which the reader can only observe as a finished product.

Such "info apps," as Wolfram called them, would allow users to explore the data sets in depth, Wolfram said. Different controls can be manipulated to show different aspects of the data relations. The data sets can also actually be live ones that change over time.