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7 <title>Contribution to policies of the European Community</title>
10 <h1>Community added value and contribution to EC policies</h1>
11 <p>The Project relies in an essential way on the convergence of information
12 processing, communication and new media, meeting the main policy issue of
13 the IST programme. In fact, due to its very nature, mathematical
14 information is particularly suited to an integrated analysis under the
15 different perspectives of elaboration, communication and (hyper)media
16 publishing, providing a main arena for innovative experiments and
17 solutions, especially in view of the new technological frontier of the
19 <p>The Project also tries to answer to a clear need for wider
20 interoperability and coherence in the realm of mathematics over the Web,
21 especially for educational, scientific and commercial purposes.</p>
22 <p>Electronic textbooks are rapidly becoming a main tool for education and
23 knowledge dissemination. Electronic textbooks must be interactive,
24 allowing intercommunication between the text and scientific software and
25 graphics. This is very hard to achieve starting form a mere presentational
26 description of the information, clearly requiring a sophisticated
27 semantical description of the content.</p>
28 <p>Similarly, the academic and commercial research communities generate large
29 volume of dense scientific material. Increasingly, research publications
30 are being stored in databases, especially for those areas of physics and
31 mathematics where academic journal prices have been growing at an
32 unsustainable rate. Still, however, the information is stored in a format
33 which is machine readable but not machine understandable; in particular it
34 is not suitable for any form of elaboration other than its rendering.
35 MOWGLI's content and metadata levels are exactly meant to address complex
36 elaboration requirements, and to facilitate the maintenance and
37 operability of large document collections, for which automatic searching
38 and indexing are crucial.</p>
39 <p>Corporate and academic scientists and engineers also use technical
40 documents in their work to collaborate, to record results of experiments
41 and computer simulations, and to verify calculations. The Web is,
42 potentially, the natural media for sharing this information; MOWGLI is
43 meant to provide the basic technology to transform this potentiality into
44 an actual possibility.</p>
45 <p>Commercial publishers are also involved with mathematics on the Web at all
46 levels from electronic versions of printed books to interactive textbooks
47 and academic journals. In this case, MOWGLI offers support for advanced
48 capabilities, such as browsing, interactivity, presentational and
49 stylistic customisation, and advanced searching and retrieving
51 <p>The project deals with problems traditionally belonging to different
52 scientific communities: digital libraries, Web publishing, automation of
53 mathematics and computer aided reasoning. Any serious solution needs a
54 coordinated effort of all these groups and a synergy of their different
55 expertise. The members of the consortium have been also carefully chosen
56 for their experience in the above mentioned areas. From this interaction,
57 we expect to develop new technologies and solutions, <i>fostering
58 innovation</i> towards the construction of the Semantic Web.</p>
59 <p>MOWGLI contributes in the <i>spread of information and know-how</i>, since
60 new information technologies will be applied to realms such as education
61 and publishing, which are traditionally not very inclined to innovation.
62 More <i>competitiveness</i> will be acquired both by the end users of the
63 system and by the technology providers, which will eventually profit by
64 the expertise gained by applying new and emerging technologies to the huge
65 and compelling problem of the management of mathematical documents over
67 <p>By opening new perspectives in the domains of interactive publishing and
68 education, MOWGLI suggests <i>new job-profiles</i> in these domains, and
69 <i>increases job opportunities</i> in the Information Society sector.</p>
70 <p>Finally, the <i>social and cultural cohesion</i> of Europe is eventually
71 strengthened by the creation of a large distributed repositories of
72 scientific knowledge.</p>
74 <h1>Contribution to Community Social Objectives</h1>
75 <p>The quality of life, in a civilised country, strictly depends on the
76 quality of its services, and in particular on the attention devoted to
77 those services aimed to preserve, increase and make accessible to a wider
78 audience its cultural and scientific heritage. Building a user friendly
79 Information Society, with particular emphasis on digital heritage,
80 cultural content and education is indeed a main social objective of the
81 European Community.</p>
82 <p>The new Information Society is essentially based on the convergence of
83 information, communication and networking technologies and takes
84 advantage of infrastructures like the Internet and the Web.</p>
85 <p>Our project builds on these grounds, to create the technological
86 infrastructure required for the creation and maintenance of a digital
87 knowledge base of <i>structured</i> mathematical information, universally
88 and seamlessly accessible to all people, and in particular to students and
89 professionals, through interoperable, dependable and affordable products
91 <p>From the educational point of view, our system could easily become a main
92 tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical
93 knowledge. Indeed, its interactive nature, and the possibility to access
94 single information units, and possibly applying them, provides a more
95 operational and far less abstract comprehension of mathematical entities,
96 and should naturally induce the user to play with the knowledge base,
97 assembling components in the development of new theorems and results.
98 From the educational point of view, our system could easily become a main
99 tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical
100 knowledge. Indeed, its interactive nature, and the possibility to access
101 single information units, and possibly applying them, provides a more
102 operational and far less abstract comprehension of mathematical entities,
103 and should naturally induce the user to play with the knowledge base,
104 assembling components in the development of new theorems and results.</p>
105 <p>From the point of view of employment and development of individual skills,
106 there are two different aspects to be considered, according to the
107 <i>objectives</i> and the <i>methodology</i> of the project.</p>
108 <p>From the methodological point of view, the project makes an essential use
109 of technologies which are the very foundations of the information society,
110 driving their development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating
111 their take up in Europe. In particular, we shall build on most of the
112 recent recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), like XML,
113 DOM, XSL, XLL, MathML, RDF, etc. testing their applicability to the
114 definition of a comprehensive, integrated description of a given field of
116 <p>This kind of tools and techniques is of crucial importance in the
117 development of the Web and of the Information Technology of the next
118 years, and our project could play a major role in their dissemination in
119 Europe, and in training people in their use.</p>
120 <p>On the other side, MOWGLI itself could become a major source of
121 inspiration for the re-invention of existing activities, and in particular
122 for the exploitation of new business in the publishing market. Currently,
123 digital journals just offer purely textual objects: our project could
124 help to define new market possibility for content-based publishing (i.e.
125 structured, possibly formal mathematical developments), with all the
126 potentialities offered by this approach, from browsing facilities, to the
127 personalisation of the style, from enhanced forms of searching, to more
128 or less arbitrarily complex forms of elaboration.</p>
129 <p>Our system also opens new perspectives on the mechanisation of mathematics
130 and the automation of formal reasoning. The growing complexity of advanced
131 technological projects (in the areas of electronic and avionic
132 engineering, for example) has recently arose a renewed interest in formal
133 methods. From this respect, our project contributes to build an essential
134 infrastructure for the exploitation of these methods, providing a major
135 help for professionals, and fostering their skills.</p>
136 <p>Let us finally remark that the project has no negative impact on the
137 natural environment. We could even claim a few benefits, related to the
138 electronic distribution of documents, such as the minimisation in the use
139 of means of conveyance and the saving of paper.</p>
140 <p>The possible customisation via suitable style-sheets of <i>structured</i>
141 electronic documents could also meet the needs of particular users, such
142 as disabled (in particular, disabled students) or elderly (as retired
143 researchers who would like to continue their professional activity),
144 providing at the same time comfortable working conditions (e.g. at home).
145 Another general design requirement is the ability to render mathematical
146 material in other media such as speech or braille, which is extremely
147 important for the visually impaired.</p>
148 <p>In conclusion, the aim of our work is to contribute to the creation of the
149 next generation of user-friendly, dependable and interoperable
150 general-interest services, meeting user demands for flexible access, for
151 everybody, from anywhere, at any time.</p>