Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects

Identification of exploitable results

MOWGLI is meant to develop, evaluate, fine-tune and deliver a complete prototype supporting friendly and interactive access to huge, distributed repositories of content-based mathematical knowledge. The purpose of the project is to overcome some of the main obstacles that currently hinder a wider dissemination of Information Technologies in the mathematical and research community (comprising both professionals and students). This is intended as a public service for the whole community of users, and we expect no direct commercial profit by our work.

Of course, the core technologies and languages developed in MOWGLI may be exploited in a lot of different ways, according to the nature and exploitation plan of each partner.

In particular, it should be clear that having a coherent, distributed library of structured mathematical knowledge, saved in a clearly defined, well documented and application independent format, is just the starting point of a wider, potentially enormous process. Building on the grounds provided by MOWGLI, a lot of different services can be imagined, and independently developed by different organisations. Inside the project, we shall just give a few hints in this direction, supporting advanced and interactive forms of searching and navigation, as well as automatic validation facilities, for suitable fragments of the library.

Target Market

The main target market of MOWGLI is education. Here, the potentiality offered by a semantic description of the information for the development of interactive, electronic textbooks are enormous. In particular, the MOWGLI prototype could become an essential tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge.

A second, potential market is Publishing. Digital libraries currently suffers from clear limitations due to the machine-readable but not machine understandable encoding of the information. No other kind of elaboration than displaying or printing is usually possible. There is no possibility of cut-and paste, formal checking, complex searching. For instance, we cannot write a spider going around searching for a proof with a given template, because there is not structure, and in particular no semantics inside the text.

A third market are industries specialised in formal verification and security. These industries are usually asked to check a given system or protocol for security issues or formal validation of functional/temporal behaviour. The result of the formalisation work and its automatic validation is typically in an internal format which is obscure even to experts. Studying the possibility to automatically generate a more friendly presentation in usual mathematical notation is thus a major topic.

Consortium's Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy

According to the Project Workplan, a considerable effort will be devoted to the dissemination/exploitation of the results. During the first six months, the consortium will undertake the development and execution of a workplan to achieve successful dissemination of the project results. In particular, the very nature of the project suggests to involve the largest community of professionals during the modelling phase. Here, we shall be open to any contribution, even soliciting them, still keeping final technical decisions inside the Project.
The foreseen dissemination steps include:

Preparation of an ``information pack'', including a folder and CDROM with demos.
Presentation of MOWGLI to national and international conferences on I.T.Technologies.
Presentation of MOWGLI to thematic conferences on Education, Digital Libraries, Formal Verification and so on.
Advertising to actors/institutions which may be direct users or may channel the information to final users (such as the World Wide Web Consortium).
Technical papers and articles to be sent to specialised reviews.
Management of the MOWGLI Web site.
Dissemination of technical achievements in specific scientific communities, such as XML-related interests groups.

Management of the Exploitation and Dissemination activities is a specific Work-package that will be lead by the Project Exploitation Board. It is planned that all partners will nominate qualified persons as exploitation managers to coordinate their own exploitation activities. The Exploitation Board will be in charge of the preparation of the exploitation and dissemination plan.

Index

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Last updated Fri Feb 2 17:12:17 CET 2007.