The Consortium

The Consortium is made of 6 sites:

The Consortium has been built with the aim to join some essential knowhow in different areas of I.T. related to the creation and maintenance of a digital library of structured mathematical knowledge.

MOWGLI is meant to develop the technological infrastructure required to integrate existing Markup languages and standards such as MathML, OpenMath or OMDoc, covering different aspects of mathematical intelligence, into a single application. Expertise on these languages and the related technologies is respectively provided by the following partners:

MathML: Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, member of the World Wide Web Consortium and of the W3C Working Group on MathML; Lemme-Project at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis.
OpenMath: University of Eindhoven (sub-site of Nijmegen): Professor Arjeh Cohen is one of the leaders of the OpenMath initiative, and MOWGLI is expected to take the maximum profit from the successful OpenMath Esprit project, no.24969.
OMDoc: DFKI. Dr.Michael Kohlhase is the main auhtor of OMDoc; DFKI has a long research tradition in the management of mathematical knowledge bases, metadata, searching and retrieval issues.

More generally, the Department of Computer Science in Bologna has a long experience in XML-related technology, and in particular in their application to the particular domain of mathematical developments, as testified by the ``Hypertextual Electronic Library of Mathematics'' (HELM) Project. A main component of HELM is the GtkMathView widget, a C++ rendering engine for MathML that will be distributed as an official package of the next Debian release of Linux.

Similarly, the Lemme Project in Sophia-Antipolis has a large experience of edition of mathematical objects. It develops the graphical environment Pcoq, dedicated to the development of mathematical proofs, using the Coq proof assistant. Among many features, Pcoq has a sophisticated two dimensional formula and natural language proof edition component, allowing intuitive and powerful interactions. Built on the Figue environment, Pcoq can be made compatible with MathML. The Pcoq interface is intensively used by teams whose research activity concerns the certification of mathematical algorithms.

DFKI will contribute requirements and metadata from the viewpoint of educational applications including search functionalities. It will actively work on presentational transformations, the generation of proofs in natural language as well as on knowledge bases for mathematical knowledge DFKI intends to exploit the results of the MOWGLI project in pilot applications in current and planned research and in projects for the prototypical implementation of intelligent environments for learning of mathematics. In particular, the knowledge representation for mathematics on the Web is important for such Web-based systems. Knowledge bases that provide a common repository and ontology for mathematical knowledge are indispensible in systems that integrate various systems working on mathematical knowledge. DFKI also has a fierce interest in pushing and leveraging the quality of standardisation efforts within the worldwide initiative of the Semantic Web education systems and electronic publishing.

In order to immediately dispose of a large repository of structured mathematical information, the consortium comprises the developers of one of the most successful proof assistant tools currently available: the Coq proof engine of INRIA-Rocquencourt. The Coq standard library includes more than thousand lemmas and theorems and the whole number of statements proved by users is evaluated to hundred thousands, covering arithmetics, algebra, analysis and computer science. We expect to integrate the current different ways of browsing, searching and rendering Coq mathematical developments into a coherent and Web-oriented architecture open to the Coq user community and beyond.

An alternative route for the creation of content-based mathematical information from standard digital repositories by means of a suitable LaTeX-based authoring system will be explored by the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) in Golm (Germany). AEI publishes a solely electronic review journal, Living Reviews in Relativity on the Web, which provides refereed, regularly updated review articles on all areas of gravitational physics. Since its release in January 1998 the journal has become a primary entry point for students, lecturers and researchers alike for up-to-date information on the current status of research in gravitational physics. Moving this unique repository and communication forum of current physical and mathematical knowledge in relativity to content mark-up, making it available for semantic search, and for re-use and evaluation e.g. in math algebra systems motivates the involvement in the MOWGLI project. The journal will develop a LaTeX based authoring tool interfacing with MOWGLI, and serve as a showcase to demonstrate how content-mark-up in mathematics improves the usability and information depth of electronic science journals.

The AEI will be supported by the newly founded Center for Information Management (CIM) of the Max Planck Society. The CIM has been set up by the Society to support researchers and research processes in the area of information management. The objectives of the project include coordination of existing activities within the Society and implementation of a strategy to develop electronic research archives. The current Managing Editor of the AEI's electronic journal Living Reviews in Relativity has been appointed executive director of the CIM (starting from 1 Sep 2001) and will be in charge of the project management for Tasks 4.4 and 6.3 of the proposal. The CIM will be in an excellent position to promote dissemination and use of the project results within the Max Planck Society. It will further give technical support to the Dissemination Manager in providing the MOWGLI website.

Professor Wegner, Scientific Coordinator of EMIS (European Mathematical Information Service), will also provide a main liaison with previous and successful European Projects on digital libraries and metadata, such as EULER and the TRIAL Solution project (\verb+http://www.trial-solution.de+). In particular, all the achievements of these Projects will be integrated inside MOWGLI, as far as the respective teams will agree to this. Moreover, in his quality of Scientific Coordinator of EMIS, member of the advisory board for MATHDI, and Chairman of the Electronic Publishing Committee of European Mathematical Society, Professor Wegner is an excellent candidate to organise the information dissemination and exploitation activities for the project.

In particular, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Nijmegen will apply MOWGLI's technologies to the development of an ``electronic book'', covering a typical undergraduate course in Algebra or Analysis. The Department of Computer Science in Nijmegen has a lot of experience in formal mathematics and theorem proving. Notably, the group has done large theory developments in the theorem prover Coq. (The FTA project: Eindhoven University of Technology, a sub-site of Nijmegen, has expertise in OpenMath and in using WWW technology for educational purposes. This has resulted -- among other things -- in IDA, the interactive course notes in algebra where a combination of HTML and applets is used to present the mathematics. Jointly, Nijmegen and Eindhoven have experience in combining theorem provers and computer algebra packages, notably Coq and GAP.

Trusted Logic (France), which is specialized in secure and validated solutions for open systems, aims to present the formalization and the demonstration of some security properties related to the code embedded into a smart card. The presentation must be in a format understandable by the company in charge of the evaluation of the code and in accordance with the Common Criteria standard.

A third pilot application is the semantic markup of the Journal Living Reviews in Relativity published by AEI-Golm, already mentioned above.

This page is hosted by the Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna.
Last updated Fri Feb 2 17:12:17 CET 2007.