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