Project Summary

Objectives

The World Wide Web is already the largest resource of mathematical knowledge, and its importance will be exponentiated by emerging display technologies like MathML. However, almost all mathematical documents available on the Web are marked up only for presentation, severely crippling the potentialities for automation, interoperability, sophisticated searching mechanisms, intelligent applications, transformation and processing. The goal of the project is to overcome these limitations, passing form 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 our 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, we shall deeply explore the potentialities of XML in the following directions:

Publishing: XML offers sophisticated 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 encodings of the 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 finally aimed to the access of 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 the information; our 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.

Milestones and Expected Results

First MOWGLI prototype (month 18): Supporting browsing, rendering and on-line consultation of large repositories of (content-based) mathematical knowledge. The translation from content to presentation will be done via suitable notational stylesheets.
Advanced MOWGLI prototype (month 24): Supporting distribution, indexing, searching and retrieval (based on a sophisticated metadata model).
Final MOWGLI prototype (month 30): Result of validation.

Index

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