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Content archived on 2024-05-15

Mathematics On the Web: Get it by Logic and Interfaces

Objective

Due to its rich notational, logical and semantic structure, mathematical knowledge provides a main case study for the development of the so-called Semantic Web. Associating meaning with content or establishing a layer of machine understandable data will allow automated agents, sophisticated search engines and interoperable services and will enable a higher degree of automation and more intelligent applications. The aim of the project is both to contribute to the technological development of the Semantic Web, and to pave the way towards a really useful virtual, distributed, hyper-textual resource for the working mathematician, scientist, engineer or student.
Due to its rich notational, logical and semantic structure, mathematical knowledge provides a main case study for the development of the so-called Semantic Web. Associating meaning with content or establishing a layer of machine understandable data will allow automated agents, sophisticated search engines and interoperable services and will enable a higher degree of automation and more intelligent applications. The aim of the project is both to contribute to the technological development of the Semantic Web, and to pave the way towards a really useful virtual, distributed, hyper-textual resource for the working mathematician, scientist, engineer or student.

OBJECTIVES
The World Wide Web is already the largest resource of mathematical knowledge, and its importance will be increase exponentially through emerging display technologies like MathML.
However, almost all mathematical documents available on the Web are marked up only for presentation, severely crippling the potential for automation, interoperability, sophisticated searching mechanisms, intelligent applications, transformation and processing. The goal of the projects is to overcome these limitations, passing from a machine-readable to a machine understandable representation of the information, and developing the technological infrastructure for its exploitation. MOWGLI builds on previous "standards" for the management and publishing of mathematical documents (MathML, OpenMath, OMDoc), integrating them with different XML technology (XSLT, RDF).

DESCRIPTION OF WORK
The goal of the project is to provide a comprehensive description, from content to metadata, of a given field of knowledge, in this case mathematics, in order to enhance its accessibility, exchange and elaboration via the World Wide Web. MOWGLI will make an essential use of standard XML technology and aspires to become an example of "best practice" in its use, and a leading project in the new area of the Semantic Web.
In particular, the project will explore deeply the potentialities of XML in the following directions:- Publishing: XML offers sophisticated Web publishing technologies (Stylesheets, MathML, SVG) which can be profitably used to solve, in a standard way, the annoying notational problems that traditionally afflict content based and machine understandable encoding of information;
Searching and Retrieving: Metadata will play a major role in MOWGLI. New W3C languages such as the Resource Description Framework or XML Query are likely to produce major innovative solutions in this field;
- Interoperability: disposing of a common, machine understandable layer is a major and essential step in this direction;
- Distribution: all XML technology is ultimately directed to accessing the Web as a single, distributed resource, with no central authority and few, simple rules.
MOWGLI builds on the solid ground already provided by previous European projects (such as OpenMath and Euler) and several XML dialects for the management of mathematical documents (MathML, OpenMath, OMDoc). All these languages cover different and orthogonal aspects of information; in this project the aim is not to propose a new standard, but to study and to develop the technological infrastructure required for taking advantage of the potentialities of all of them.

Call for proposal

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Coordinator

ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA
EU contribution
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Address
VIA ZAMBONI 33
40126 BOLOGNA
Italy

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Total cost
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Participants (5)