IBM techexplorer : Scientific Publishing for the Internet

Abstract

The IBM techexplorer Hypermedia Browser is an application for the interactive publication of scientific and technical documents. The original project started as an experiment at IBM Research to see how a from-scratch implementation of a subset of T E X, L A T E X, and AMS-L A T E X could be extended to support interactive viewing of documents for a computer algebra system. This interactivity is accomplished via support for hypertext, multimedia, user-defined pop-up windows and menus, and a modular architecture that allows connections with other applications and Java applets. The primary version of techexplorer operates as a Netscape Navigator plug-in and is available for several platforms, including Windows 95 and NT, IBM AIX, and Sun Solaris. In addition to being able to display full documents using the supported T E X subset, techexplorer is being extended to support the new "Mathematical Markup Language" from the HTML Math Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium. In this paper, we provide an overview of techexplorer and detail how it can be used to deliver mathematical articles, books, and course materials via the World Wide Web. We also discuss our intended use of the OpenMath standard to allow documents to contain reusable semantically attributed math objects.