A report on OpenMath

Abstract

The proliferation of general purpose mathematical software and specialized mathematical libraries has provided a wealth of computing resources for students, scientists, and engineers. The challenge remains to harness the power of these independent software tools within a single framework. OpenMath will provide formats and a protocol for the exchange of mathematical expressions and objects, thus enabling a unification from a user's point of view. This work will also allow the inclusion of mathematical objects in a universal format within databases and electronically published scientific and technical documents.This report will detail the steps taken to date by the OpenMath Consortium to achieve the aforementioned goals. In particular, §2 provides an overview of OpenMath. Emphasis is placed on OpenMath's design goals, initial target applications, and Consortium structure. In §3, an exposition of the levels of the OpenMath model which maps mathematical concepts to their respective concrete representations is provided. Some issues that arise when a mathematical object is transcribed between its visual form and internal representation are presented in §4. Finally, §5 and §6 communicate the current state of the OpenMath prototyping efforts and concomitantly detail the future directions of the OpenMath consortium.

IBM techexplorer : Scientific Publishing for the Internet

“…We plan to evolve the techexplorer scientific and technical publishing Web Developers Kit (WDK) to allow for the transmission of standard math presentation and semantic encoding protocols such as the World Wide Web Consortium HTML Math and OpenMath specifications. The HTML Math Content tags and OpenMath [7,1] XML encoding detail the underlying mathematical structure of an expression, rather than any particular rendering for the expression. This intermediate semantic format will facility math object communication between varying math systems.…”

Computer Algebra Meets Automated Theorem Proving: Integrating Maple and PVS

“…One solution is to define a standard for mathematical information that can, in principle, be understood by any mathematical computation system. Examples of this common knowledge approach include the Open-Math project [1,11], and protocols for the exchange of information between generic CAS and ATP systems [5,15]. Another solution is the sub-package approach, in which communication issues are side-stepped by building an ATP within a CAS.…”

An OpenMath 1.0 implementation

“…The MathBus interchange format, developed by Zippel and others [15], is an interesting recent initiative focusing on a small, low-level core of structures into which representations used by a wide variety of languages can be mapped.…”