Contribution to programme/key action objectives

The Project contributes to build a user friendly information society, and in particular it meets the following general objectives of this program:

(multimedia content) confirming Europe as a leading force in this field, realizing the potential of its creativity and culture;
(essential technologies and infrastructure) enabling technologies which are the foundations of the information society, driving their development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating their take up in Europe.

As a matter of fact, the project is based in an essential way on the use of most part of the recent recommendations of the World Wide Web Organization for Web publishing and human-computer interaction (XML, XSL, XLL, Namespaces, MathML, RDF, etc.). In particular, we aim to prove how all these specifications naturally fit together, when trying to build a full, integrated description (comprising content, notation, metadata, etc.) of a given field of knowledge. At our knowledge, the project is the first of the kind, and could become a paradigmatic example in the integrated use of these technologies.

The project also addresses most of the issues of the multimedia content key action, namely: electronic publishing, digital heritage and cultural content, education, information access, filtering and handling. Actually, all these aspects are and must be covered in our project, in order to reach our objectives. In particular, the educational potential of our system should not be neglected either: it could become an essential tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge. For instance, if supported by a suitable technology, proving theorems in a proof assistant could be as amusing as playing a video game. We imagine bunches of young researchers contributing to the free development of the library for the mere gratification of seeing their name as actual editor (or, why not, original author) of a specific fragment.

Finally, the project is particularly related to the specific key-action III.2.3 (access to scientific and cultural heritage). In fact, the aim of our system is exactly to improve access by students and professionals to the fast-growing mathematical knowledge base, allowing mathematical documents to be retrieved, served, and processed directly on the Web. More over, our system is meant to be compatible with most of the existing tools for the mechanisation of mathematics and the automation of formal reasoning (proof assistants and logical frameworks). The possibility to build coherent sub-libraries of formal mathematical developments would provide an essential (and unique) added value to the library itself, making of Europe a leader in this area.

Maybe, having the possibility to process, analyse and elaborate mathematical structures as data, the time will come when we shall finally be able to start a completely new and exciting field of research on mathematics: namely a scientific, empirical study on the real structure of mathematical entities, and the ``way of thinking'' of mathematicians.

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Last updated Fri Feb 2 17:12:26 CET 2007.