Works for me as well now in both Fedora Linux systems with Mathematica 10.1 and Windows 7 with Wolfram Desktop 10.1. I can see the initialization of the Wolfram Knowledgebase connection after loading the EntityFramework and running EnityValue again

Dear Hans,

thanks a lot for checking. I am getting frustrated that Voodoo does not seem to apply to me. Is it included in Premier Service Plus?

Cheers,

M.

Hi everyone,

I got a very useful piece of advice from technical support:

Get["EntityFramework`"]

apparently fixes (some of?) the problem at least for the active session. If you restart Mathematica then you will need to run that again. I gather that this is not the final solution, but we are definitely getting there.

I would be grateful if other people with that problem could try this and report back whether it worked for them. It worked on all computers I currently have access to.

The technical support was extremely friendly and helpful. A very good service indeed.

Cheers,

Marco

Mathematica 10 comes with, and should use, its own installation of Java (specifically a Java 7, I believe at $InstallationDirectory/SystemFiles/Java). There should be no need to install Java yourself, even on Mac.

I'm suspicious of the space character in the $InstallationDirectory of /Applications/Mathematica 2.app/Contents for the non-working system quoted by Marco above. I could easily be wrong, but try using a different installation directory that does not include a space?

Hi,

tried this as well. Did not work for me either.

Best wishes

Bjoern

A suggestion from tech support:

execute

RebuildPacletData[]

Considering the lack of paclet files in your printout of SystemInformation[], it might do something.

My installation directory is

"/[InvisibleSpace]Applications/[InvisibleSpace]Mathematica.app/\ [InvisibleSpace]Contents"

and there are lots of files in it. Not sure why your app is called Mathematica 2.app.

Unfortunately, I did not do SystemInformation[] when my system was not working.

The last e-mail I got from tech support was that the developers were looking into the problem. I think you have found an important clue. On the off chance that the developers are not aware of this thread, I suggest that you send them both SystemInformation[] outputs. (I already sent my SystemInformation[] data for my working installation, and I do not have the 'before' version.)

With so many files, etc., apparently missing, there my be other functionality not working.

Anyway, this may point to a solution....

george

Great! That leaves me stranded. I have uninstalled Java; Mathematica does not work. I have deleted Mathematica and reinstalled. Mathematica does not work. I have reinstalled Java 8 (JDK) Mathematica does not work. I have deleted Mathematica and reinstalled it; it does not work. I also tried older versions of Java. Does not work either.

I will probably get the same piece of advice from TechSupport, and it will not work for me. I am not really sure what Voodoo suggests in these cases...

Cheers,

M.

Here's a couple of additional data points:

EntityValue[ ] works on: Fedora 21 Linux 64-bit, Mathematica 10.0.2 and Wolfram Desktop 10.0.2

EntityValue[ ] fails on: Fedora 21 Linux 64-bit, Mathematica 10.1, Windows 7 64-bit Wolfram Desktop 10.1

On Linux, I've tried the support note on resetting Mathematica and even tried removing Java without any change in the behavior of EntityValue.

The Linux system has Mathematica 10.0.2 and 10.1 installed, the Windows system doesn't have any version of Mathematica. I've also removed Mathematica from another Fedora Linux system to test whether a clean install of Mathematica 10.1 would work correctly, but it didn't.

One thing that I've noticed is that when EntityValue[ ] works on both Mathematica 10.0.2 and Wolfram Desktop 10.0.2, the first invocation of EntityValue[ ] displays:

Initializing Wolfram Knowledgebase connection

This isn't shown on systems where EntityValue[ ] doesn't evaluate correctly.

This bugs me now. It works on one computer, but not on another one:

The Java version is from Oracles website. I have removed the ~/Library/... folder and reinstalled everything. Restarted the computer several times. This is on OS X 10.10.3 with MMA 10.1. Same versions do appear to work on another system I have.

MMA 10.0.2 on the exact same system works very nicely.

Best wishes,

Marco

Hi Marco

Where do I find info on my version of Java?

(Java is not listed under Programs and Features. W 8.1)

The input of EntityProperties["Aircraft"] just returns the input. On both PC's.

On one of them I have tried to:

• Reset Mathematica according to KB12464. The problems remained.
• Uninstalled and then reinstalled Mathematica 10.1. Still the problems remains.

It seems that something might be generally wrong with accessing curated data from MMA 10.1. This is from the documentation of StarData:

But when trying out the example, the result is less than informative:

Tried this on two different PC's. One W7, the other W8.1

OK.

Can you let us know in the community what worked (assuming you find out). We may be in a similar position some day.

Perhaps the Java solution just applied to Macs -- Apple has been trying to wean users away from Java for the last couple OS releases.

I included a link to this discussion in the e-mail I sent to tech support. (If you have not sent them a missive, I suggest that you do.) Perhaps they will read this and have some suggestions.

Mine is a pretty simple set up -- no corporate firewalls, etc. and, as of yesterday, a plain vanilla installation of Mathematica 10.1. Dealing with curated data involves a lot of 'moving parts'.

If I get a response from tech support, I will post it here.

I found the problem.

After dumping the UserBaseDirectory, BaseDirectory, re-installing Mathematica, etc. I found out what would fix the problem.

I installed Java 8 update 45 on my system. I got this from the Java (Oracle) website.

After doing this, the code for EntityValue[] works -- even the documentation code works.

Previously, if you ran Mathematica on an Mac that did not have Java, the OS would notice that Java was missing, and offer to download and instal Java 6 SE. This worked just fine up to version 9, and I believe 10.0, but I can't be sure.

Apparently 10.1 requires Java 8.

I think that Mathematica should be smart enough to look for the required files and offer to install them.

Dear Sean,

thank you for your help. I am aware that they should be the same but the format without the yellow boxes does not evaluate - sorry I should have made that clearer. It is like in this post. If you ask for, say the population size, you do get an unevaluated function. In the "good" system you get the population size.

I cannot really pin the problem down. Mathematica works as expected on my 15+ computers. But it appears that on all the ones of a colleague it has issues. We are working with academic licenses. Some days ago we bought a Standard (commercial) license each for my colleague and myself. It is installed on a Windows server, where I first noticed the problem. When we checked my colleague's computers (>5 independent machines), they all had problems. Also one of hist Post-docs seems to have the exact same problem. First we thought that it might be because they run a more recent version of Java, but that does not explain it. (Downgrading Java and new install does not fix it.)

Also I have noticed that there could be a server issue at least contributing to the problem. I don't think that this explains it all. Here is what I see on one of the one for the problematic system:

And then the one for the ok system:

This is curious because both computers are connected to the internet. They are in the same network and have the same network config as far as I can see. I have not had the time to test this systematically though. BTW, I would to ask for the population of Berlin like that with an "=" sign at the beginning, but if I do it in the standard way with EntityValue, I do just get the input unevaluated.

Anyway, on the good system, the "plain text command" and the orange box one seem to evaluate fine. On the other system they do not.

Oh, yes, on all systems, when I use the Preferences tab to check the internet connectivity, all systems say that they can connect to the Wolfram server.

Best wishes and thanks again for your help,

Marco

Hi Everyone,

I can (sort of) reproduce this. It works just fine on my computers (mostly all sorts of Macs running OS X). I am, however, admin of a site license and I have now found people who have this issue. On their computers (Macs, Windows) Entity and related commands to not evaluate properly - see below. The symptoms are similar to the ones described here. All computers can see the internet. We reinstalled Mathematica - taking care of all previous Mathematica related files on the computers; and, because we suspected an issue with a new version of Java, we also used different Java versions, with no conclusive results.

Here is what happens:

This is as opposed to:

This only appears to concern MMA 10.1. MMA 10.0.2 runs well on these machines. We also tried different scenarios with and without removing MMA10.0.2 first. We also checked whether it could be a slightly updated version of Mathematica's installer, as described here, but we could not find any correlation.

Cheers,

Marco

What OS are you using? Evaluate ds. This prints a summary about which version of Mathematica you are using.

Maybe you have an internet connection issue? Do you see any error messages? Can you evaluate:

Import["http://www.google.com"]

Something may be wrong with Mathematica's configuration. I would suggestion following this article:

http://support.wolfram.com/kb/12464

Thanks, but this also does not work. The same expression is returned. Weird!

Regards,

Rangarajan