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consortium.html
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news.html
deadlines.html
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- project-objectives.html \
- project-summary.html \
- contribution.html \
- innovation.html \
- EC-contribution.html \
- econ-scient-tech-prospects.html \
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+ proposal/innovation.html \
+ proposal/EC-contribution.html \
+ proposal/econ-scient-tech-prospects.html \
consortium.html \
project.html \
news.html \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
$(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) $<
-project-management.html: $(XMLROOT)/project-management.xml \
+proposal/proposal-index.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/proposal-index.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+
+
+proposal/project-management.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/project-management.xml \
+ $(XHTMLCONTENT)
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
-project-summary.html: $(XMLROOT)/project-summary.xml \
+proposal/project-summary.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/project-summary.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
-project-objectives.html: $(XMLROOT)/project-objectives.xml \
+proposal/project-objectives.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/project-objectives.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
-contribution.html: $(XMLROOT)/contribution.xml \
+proposal/contribution.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/contribution.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
-innovation.html: $(XMLROOT)/innovation.xml \
+proposal/innovation.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/innovation.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
-EC-contribution.html: $(XMLROOT)/EC-contribution.xml \
+proposal/EC-contribution.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/EC-contribution.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
-econ-scient-tech-prospects.html: $(XMLROOT)/econ-scient-tech-prospects.xml \
+proposal/econ-scient-tech-prospects.html: $(XMLROOT)/proposal/econ-scient-tech-prospects.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
- sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'.'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
+ sed $(RMDOCTYPE) $< | $(XSLTP) --param path_to_top "'..'" --param use_frames "'$(FRAMES)'" -o $@ $(XHTMLCONTENT) -
mowgli-events/kick-off.html: $(XMLROOT)/mowgli-events/kick-off.xml \
$(XHTMLCONTENT)
--- /dev/null
+proposal-index.html
+project-management.html
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+project-summary.html
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+innovation.html
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+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Contribution to policies of the European Community</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Community added value and contribution to EC policies</h1>
- <p>The Project relies in an essential way on the convergence of information
- processing, communication and new media, meeting the main policy issue of
- the IST programme. In fact, due to its very nature, mathematical
- information is particularly suited to an integrated analysis under the
- different perspectives of elaboration, communication and (hyper)media
- publishing, providing a main arena for innovative experiments and
- solutions, especially in view of the new technological frontier of the
- Semantic Web.</p>
- <p>The Project also tries to answer to a clear need for wider
- interoperability and coherence in the realm of mathematics over the Web,
- especially for educational, scientific and commercial purposes.</p>
- <p>Electronic textbooks are rapidly becoming a main tool for education and
- knowledge dissemination. Electronic textbooks must be interactive,
- allowing intercommunication between the text and scientific software and
- graphics. This is very hard to achieve starting form a mere presentational
- description of the information, clearly requiring a sophisticated
- semantical description of the content.</p>
- <p>Similarly, the academic and commercial research communities generate large
- volume of dense scientific material. Increasingly, research publications
- are being stored in databases, especially for those areas of physics and
- mathematics where academic journal prices have been growing at an
- unsustainable rate. Still, however, the information is stored in a format
- which is machine readable but not machine understandable; in particular it
- is not suitable for any form of elaboration other than its rendering.
- MOWGLI's content and metadata levels are exactly meant to address complex
- elaboration requirements, and to facilitate the maintenance and
- operability of large document collections, for which automatic searching
- and indexing are crucial.</p>
- <p>Corporate and academic scientists and engineers also use technical
- documents in their work to collaborate, to record results of experiments
- and computer simulations, and to verify calculations. The Web is,
- potentially, the natural media for sharing this information; MOWGLI is
- meant to provide the basic technology to transform this potentiality into
- an actual possibility.</p>
- <p>Commercial publishers are also involved with mathematics on the Web at all
- levels from electronic versions of printed books to interactive textbooks
- and academic journals. In this case, MOWGLI offers support for advanced
- capabilities, such as browsing, interactivity, presentational and
- stylistic customisation, and advanced searching and retrieving
- features.</p>
- <p>The project deals with problems traditionally belonging to different
- scientific communities: digital libraries, Web publishing, automation of
- mathematics and computer aided reasoning. Any serious solution needs a
- coordinated effort of all these groups and a synergy of their different
- expertise. The members of the consortium have been also carefully chosen
- for their experience in the above mentioned areas. From this interaction,
- we expect to develop new technologies and solutions, <i>fostering
- innovation</i> towards the construction of the Semantic Web.</p>
- <p>MOWGLI contributes in the <i>spread of information and know-how</i>, since
- new information technologies will be applied to realms such as education
- and publishing, which are traditionally not very inclined to innovation.
- More <i>competitiveness</i> will be acquired both by the end users of the
- system and by the technology providers, which will eventually profit by
- the expertise gained by applying new and emerging technologies to the huge
- and compelling problem of the management of mathematical documents over
- the Web.</p>
- <p>By opening new perspectives in the domains of interactive publishing and
- education, MOWGLI suggests <i>new job-profiles</i> in these domains, and
- <i>increases job opportunities</i> in the Information Society sector.</p>
- <p>Finally, the <i>social and cultural cohesion</i> of Europe is eventually
- strengthened by the creation of a large distributed repositories of
- scientific knowledge.</p>
-
- <h1>Contribution to Community Social Objectives</h1>
- <p>The quality of life, in a civilised country, strictly depends on the
- quality of its services, and in particular on the attention devoted to
- those services aimed to preserve, increase and make accessible to a wider
- audience its cultural and scientific heritage. Building a user friendly
- Information Society, with particular emphasis on digital heritage,
- cultural content and education is indeed a main social objective of the
- European Community.</p>
- <p>The new Information Society is essentially based on the convergence of
- information, communication and networking technologies and takes
- advantage of infrastructures like the Internet and the Web.</p>
- <p>Our project builds on these grounds, to create the technological
- infrastructure required for the creation and maintenance of a digital
- knowledge base of <i>structured</i> mathematical information, universally
- and seamlessly accessible to all people, and in particular to students and
- professionals, through interoperable, dependable and affordable products
- and services.</p>
- <p>From the educational point of view, our system could easily become a main
- tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical
- knowledge. Indeed, its interactive nature, and the possibility to access
- single information units, and possibly applying them, provides a more
- operational and far less abstract comprehension of mathematical entities,
- and should naturally induce the user to play with the knowledge base,
- assembling components in the development of new theorems and results.
- From the educational point of view, our system could easily become a main
- tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical
- knowledge. Indeed, its interactive nature, and the possibility to access
- single information units, and possibly applying them, provides a more
- operational and far less abstract comprehension of mathematical entities,
- and should naturally induce the user to play with the knowledge base,
- assembling components in the development of new theorems and results.</p>
- <p>From the point of view of employment and development of individual skills,
- there are two different aspects to be considered, according to the
- <i>objectives</i> and the <i>methodology</i> of the project.</p>
- <p>From the methodological point of view, the project makes an essential use
- of technologies which are the very foundations of the information society,
- driving their development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating
- their take up in Europe. In particular, we shall build on most of the
- recent recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), like XML,
- DOM, XSL, XLL, MathML, RDF, etc. testing their applicability to the
- definition of a comprehensive, integrated description of a given field of
- knowledge.</p>
- <p>This kind of tools and techniques is of crucial importance in the
- development of the Web and of the Information Technology of the next
- years, and our project could play a major role in their dissemination in
- Europe, and in training people in their use.</p>
- <p>On the other side, MOWGLI itself could become a major source of
- inspiration for the re-invention of existing activities, and in particular
- for the exploitation of new business in the publishing market. Currently,
- digital journals just offer purely textual objects: our project could
- help to define new market possibility for content-based publishing (i.e.
- structured, possibly formal mathematical developments), with all the
- potentialities offered by this approach, from browsing facilities, to the
- personalisation of the style, from enhanced forms of searching, to more
- or less arbitrarily complex forms of elaboration.</p>
- <p>Our system also opens new perspectives on the mechanisation of mathematics
- and the automation of formal reasoning. The growing complexity of advanced
- technological projects (in the areas of electronic and avionic
- engineering, for example) has recently arose a renewed interest in formal
- methods. From this respect, our project contributes to build an essential
- infrastructure for the exploitation of these methods, providing a major
- help for professionals, and fostering their skills.</p>
- <p>Let us finally remark that the project has no negative impact on the
- natural environment. We could even claim a few benefits, related to the
- electronic distribution of documents, such as the minimisation in the use
- of means of conveyance and the saving of paper.</p>
- <p>The possible customisation via suitable style-sheets of <i>structured</i>
- electronic documents could also meet the needs of particular users, such
- as disabled (in particular, disabled students) or elderly (as retired
- researchers who would like to continue their professional activity),
- providing at the same time comfortable working conditions (e.g. at home).
- Another general design requirement is the ability to render mathematical
- material in other media such as speech or braille, which is extremely
- important for the visually impaired.</p>
- <p>In conclusion, the aim of our work is to contribute to the creation of the
- next generation of user-friendly, dependable and interoperable
- general-interest services, meeting user demands for flexible access, for
- everybody, from anywhere, at any time.</p>
-
- </body>
-</html>
+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Contribution to programme/key action objectives</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Contribution to programme/key action objectives</h1>
- <p>The Project contributes to build a user friendly information society, and
- in particular it meets the following general objectives of this
- program:</p>
- <ol>
- <li>(multimedia content) confirming Europe as a leading force in this field,
- realizing the potential of its creativity and culture;</li>
- <li>(essential technologies and infrastructure) enabling technologies which
- are the foundations of the information society, driving their
- development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating their take
- up in Europe.</li>
- </ol>
- <p>As a matter of fact, the project is based in an essential way on the use
- of most part of the recent recommendations of the World Wide Web
- Organization for Web publishing and human-computer interaction (XML, XSL,
- XLL, Namespaces, MathML, RDF, etc.). In particular, we aim to prove how
- all these specifications naturally fit together, when trying to build a
- full, integrated description (comprising content, notation, metadata,
- etc.) of a given field of knowledge. At our knowledge, the project is the
- first of the kind, and could become a paradigmatic example in the
- integrated use of these technologies.</p>
- <p>The project also addresses most of the issues of the multimedia content
- key action, namely: electronic publishing, digital heritage and cultural
- content, education, information access, filtering and handling. Actually,
- all these aspects are and must be covered in our project, in order to
- reach our objectives. In particular, the educational potential of our
- system should not be neglected either: it could become an essential tool
- for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge. For
- instance, if supported by a suitable technology, proving theorems in a
- proof assistant could be as amusing as playing a video game. We imagine
- bunches of young researchers contributing to the free development of the
- library for the mere gratification of seeing their name as actual editor
- (or, why not, original author) of a specific fragment.</p>
- <p>Finally, the project is particularly related to the specific key-action
- III.2.3 (access to scientific and cultural heritage). In fact, the aim
- of our system is exactly to improve access by students and professionals
- to the fast-growing mathematical knowledge base, allowing mathematical
- documents to be retrieved, served, and processed directly on the Web. More
- over, our system is meant to be compatible with most of the existing tools
- for the mechanisation of mathematics and the automation of formal
- reasoning (proof assistants and logical frameworks). The possibility to
- build coherent sub-libraries of formal mathematical developments would
- provide an essential (and unique) added value to the library itself,
- making of Europe a leader in this area.</p>
- <p>Maybe, having the possibility to process, analyse and elaborate
- mathematical structures as data, the time will come when we shall finally
- be able to start a completely new and exciting field of research on
- mathematics: namely a scientific, empirical study on the <i>real</i>
- structure of mathematical entities, and the ``way of thinking'' of
- mathematicians.</p>
- </body>
-</html>
+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects</h1>
-
- <h2>Identification of exploitable results</h2>
- <p>MOWGLI is meant to develop, evaluate, fine-tune and deliver a complete
- prototype supporting friendly and interactive access to huge, distributed
- repositories of content-based mathematical knowledge. The purpose of the
- project is to overcome some of the main obstacles that currently hinder a
- wider dissemination of Information Technologies in the mathematical and
- research community (comprising both professionals and students). This is
- intended as a public service for the whole community of users, and we
- expect no direct commercial profit by our work.</p>
- <p>Of course, the core technologies and languages developed in MOWGLI may be
- exploited in a lot of different ways, according to the nature and
- exploitation plan of each partner.</p>
- <p>In particular, it should be clear that having a coherent, distributed
- library of structured mathematical knowledge, saved in a clearly defined,
- well documented and application independent format, is just the starting
- point of a wider, potentially enormous process. Building on the grounds
- provided by MOWGLI, a lot of different services can be imagined, and
- independently developed by different organisations. Inside the project, we
- shall just give a few hints in this direction, supporting advanced and
- interactive forms of searching and navigation, as well as automatic
- validation facilities, for suitable fragments of the library.</p>
-
- <h2>Target Market</h2>
- <p>The main target market of MOWGLI is education. Here, the potentiality
- offered by a semantic description of the information for the development
- of interactive, electronic textbooks are enormous. In particular, the
- MOWGLI prototype could become an essential tool for a wider and more
- friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge.</p>
- <p>A second, potential market is Publishing. Digital libraries currently
- suffers from clear limitations due to the machine-readable but not
- machine understandable encoding of the information. No other kind of
- elaboration than displaying or printing is usually possible. There is no
- possibility of cut-and paste, formal checking, complex searching. For
- instance, we cannot write a spider going around searching for a proof with
- a given template, because there is not structure, and in particular no
- semantics inside the text.</p>
- <p>A third market are industries specialised in formal verification and
- security. These industries are usually asked to check a given system or
- protocol for security issues or formal validation of functional/temporal
- behaviour. The result of the formalisation work and its automatic
- validation is typically in an internal format which is obscure even to
- experts. Studying the possibility to automatically generate a more
- friendly presentation in usual mathematical notation is thus a major
- topic.</p>
-
- <h2>Consortium's Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy</h2>
- <p>According to the Project Workplan, a considerable effort will be devoted
- to the dissemination/exploitation of the results. During the first six
- months, the consortium will undertake the development and execution of a
- workplan to achieve successful dissemination of the project results. In
- particular, the very nature of the project suggests to involve the
- largest community of professionals during the modelling phase. Here, we
- shall be open to any contribution, even soliciting them, still keeping
- final technical decisions inside the Project.
- <br/>
- The foreseen dissemination steps include:</p>
-
- <ol>
- <li>Preparation of an ``information pack'', including a folder and CDROM
- with demos.</li>
- <li>Presentation of MOWGLI to national and international conferences on
- I.T.Technologies.</li>
- <li>Presentation of MOWGLI to thematic conferences on Education, Digital
- Libraries, Formal Verification and so on.</li>
- <li>Advertising to actors/institutions which may be direct users or may
- channel the information to final users (such as the World Wide Web
- Consortium).</li>
- <li>Technical papers and articles to be sent to specialised reviews.</li>
- <li>Management of the MOWGLI Web site.</li>
- <li>Dissemination of technical achievements in specific scientific
- communities, such as XML-related interests groups.</li>
- </ol>
-
- <p>Management of the Exploitation and Dissemination activities is a specific
- Work-package that will be lead by the Project Exploitation Board. It is
- planned that all partners will nominate qualified persons as exploitation
- managers to coordinate their own exploitation activities. The Exploitation
- Board will be in charge of the preparation of the exploitation and
- dissemination plan.</p>
-
- </body>
-</html>
(<a target="_top" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>,
<a target="_top" href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a>, etc).</p>
- <p>Read more about the project:</p>
-
- <ul>
- <li><a href="project-summary.html">Summary</a></li>
- <li><a href="project-objectives.html">Objectives</a></li>
- <li><a href="project-management.html">Management</a></li>
- <li><a href="contribution.html">Contribution to programme/key action objectives</a></li>
- <li><a href="innovation.html">Innovation</a></li>
- <li><a href="EC-contribution.html">Contribution to policies of the European Community</a></li>
- <li><a href="econ-scient-tech-prospects.html">Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects</a></li>
- </ul>
-
</td>
<td>
+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Innovation</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Innovation</h1>
- <p>The main technical novelty of the project is in its synergy of different
- scientific communities and research topics: digital libraries, Web
- publishing, logical environments.</p>
-
- <img border="0" alt="Architecture" src="./../images/logo.png" />
-
- <p>From the point of view of Web publishing, our project is the first attempt
- 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. To
- this aim, we shall put to use most of the technologies recently introduced
- by the W3C: XML, DOM, XSL, XLL, Namespaces, MathML, RDF, etc. From this
- respect, the project is first of all a complex test for all these
- technologies, and should hopefully become an example of ``best practice''
- in their use. Note that the final architecture is likely to be extendible
- to other fields of structured information: the emphasis on mathematics is
- motivated by the fact that, due to its complex interplay between content,
- structure and notation, it provides a major case study for Web-based
- information systems (it is not a case that MathML has been one of few
- instances of XML completely developed under the aegis of the World Wide
- Web Consortium).</p>
- <p>From the point of view of digital libraries, our work is aimed at
- exploiting all the potential functionalities offered by the Web, and in
- particular a more integrated use of its browsing and searching facilities.
- The library is not merely seen as a more or less structured collection of
- texts, but as a virtual structure inside which we can freely navigate,
- jumping for instance from an entity to its definition, or peeping inside
- some information at deeper and deeper levels of details (such as different
- levels of detail of a proof). This is similar to what we currently do
- with HTML texts, but in order to enhance the effectiveness of the
- consultation, we clearly need a good metadata model of the information.
- Moreover, in such an integrated view, it is hardly conceivable to just
- apply some ``general purpose'' metadata model (like the Dublin Core
- system, say): the metadata model must be eventually specialised to the
- actual structure of the information it is supposed to model (and more
- structure we have on the information, more relevant metadata we can
- usually infer on the document). For instance, metadata could contain the
- whole signature of a given module of mathematical knowledge. The usual
- motivation for keeping metadata simple and general is that it is usually
- difficult to add this information by hand; but in our case a large part of
- the metadata is supposed to be extracted automatically by the (structured)
- text itself, allowing for pretty complex metadata models.</p>
- <p>Finally, a main aspect of our project is the integration with current
- tools for the automation of formal reasoning and mechanisation of
- mathematics (proof assistants and logical frameworks). This integration
- has a mutual benefit. From the point of view of the mathematical library,
- the first and fundamental role of these systems is that of providing
- friendly authoring tools (for instance, our ``core'' library will be
- automatically extracted from existing libraries of these systems). The
- relevance of this point should not be underestimated: as a matter of fact,
- the main reason for the failure of complex markup modellings is usually
- the lack of suitable authoring tools (it is often painful to add the
- markup by hand). Of course, they can also provide other functionalities
- (like automatic proof checking) on fragments of the library (typically,
- the fragments generated by the tool itself, in its specific logical
- dialect). These additional functionalities may be especially relevant for
- industrial applications, e.g. in the context of IT security evaluation
- standards like the Common Criteria standard (see
- <a href="publications/others/cc.html">others/cc</a>). In its highest
- assurance level, this standard requires the development of formal models
- of the IT product under evaluation, as well as mechanized proofs that it
- meets its security objectives. Such models and proofs must be published in
- a format that can be easily readable and understood by security
- evaluators. Hence, there is a strong need from software industry to be
- able to produce such documentation directly from the models introduced in
- the proof assistant, and to link it with documents describing the IT
- product, etc.</p>
- <p>On the other side, there is a compelling need of integration between the
- current tools for automation of formal reasoning and mechanisation of
- mathematics and the most recent technologies for the development of Web
- applications and electronic publishing. XML, which is rapidly imposing as
- a pivotal technology in the future development of all Internet
- applications, and the main tool for representation, manipulation, and
- exchange of structured information in the networked age, looks as a
- natural, almost mandatory, choice for modelling the information.</p>
- <p>In this way, we just obey to the very primitive commandment of the Web:
- make your information available. Currently, libraries in logical
- frameworks are usually saved in two formats: a textual one, in the
- specific tactical language of the proof assistant, and a compiled (proof
- checked) one in some internal, concrete representation language. Both
- representations are obviously unsatisfactory, since they are too oriented
- to the specific application: they restrict the access of the libraries to
- the users of the given application, and at the same time they are too
- sensible to the evolution and the maintenance of the application itself.
- On the other side, as soon as the information is put in a standard format
- on the Web, <i>any</i> kind of research becomes virtually possible, and
- <i>anybody</i> could start developing his own <i>spider</i> for
- implementing his own searching requirements. This is clearly a major
- improvement w.r.t. the present situation. Currently, you must not only
- rely on the searching facilities offered by the specific applications, but
- even if you would wish to implement your own searching algorithm, you
- would be prevented by the simple reason that the information is not
- accessible (in any reasonable sense of the word).</p>
- <p>The project builds on the solid ground provided by several existing
- XML-based languages for the management of mathematical documents such as
- MathML, OpenMath and OMDoc. Each of these markup languages covers a
- different aspect of the information. Our aim is not to propose a new
- language, but to study and to develop the technological infrastructure
- required to integrate all these languages together, in order to take
- advantage of the specific features of each of them.</p>
-
- </body>
-</html>
<tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="home.html">Home</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="consortium.html">Consortium</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="people-list.html">People</a></td></tr>
+ <tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="proposal/proposal-index.html">Proposal</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="work-packages/index.html">Work Packages</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="mowgli-events.html">MoWGLI Events</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a class="menulink" target="content" href="other-events.html">Other Events</a></td></tr>
<date>20020306</date>
<description>
The agenda of the
- <a href="mowgli-events/kick-off.html">MOWGLI Kick-Off meeting</a>
+ <a href="mowgli-events/kick-off.html" target="content">MOWGLI Kick-Off meeting</a>
has been detailed.
</description>
<who file="bologna/sacerdoti"/>
+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Project Management</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Project Management</h1>
- <p>The Project management will be assured by the following relevant
- roles:</p>
- <ol>
- <li>Project Manager</li>
- <li>Exploitation manager</li>
- <li>Work-package Leaders</li>
- <li>Technical Contributors</li>
- </ol>
- <p>and by the following Project Bodies:</p>
- <ol>
- <li>Project Coordination Committee (PCC)</li>
- <li>Project Exploitation Board</li>
- <li>Work-package Teams.</li>
- </ol>
- <dl>
- <dt>Project Manager</dt>
- <dd>The mandate of the Project Manager is
- to represent the Project, report to the Commission, monitor
- overall performance of the project, ensure accomplishment
- of the technical objectives, promote project visibility,
- promote dissemination of project results in the relevant international
- forums, promote acceptance of project results, administer
- project resources and monitor project spending.</dd>
-
- <dt>Exploitation Manager</dt>
- <dd>S/he will be responsible for coordinating
- exploitation activities undertaken by the Project Exploitation Board
- (PEB) in close cooperation with the Project Coordination Committee
- (PCC).</dd>
-
- <dt>Work-package Leaders</dt>
- <dd>They are responsible for the performance of
- Work-packages, and they must be committed to the Work-package for at
- least five man months per year.</dd>
-
- <dt>Technical Contributors</dt>
- <dd>Technical Contributors are specialised
- staff provided by the partners. They could be either people active on
- a stable basis into a Work-package, or people who contribute from time
- to time on specific tasks related to the work-plan (external
- contributors).</dd>
-
- <dt>Project Coordination Committee</dt>
- <dd>The PCC is chaired by the Project
- Manager and constituted by one representative from each Partner, and
- is the main decision body of the Consortium. It is in charge
- of all formal decisions regarding technical direction of the work,
- proper interrelation between Work-packages,
- relations with IST Office, policies for promotion of results,
- administrative arrangements. In view of minimising management overhead
- and project costs, partners providing the Project Manager,
- and the Work-packages Leaders are required to appoint the same
- person as their official representative in the Project
- Coordination Committee.</dd>
-
- <dt>Project Exploitation Board</dt>
- <dd>The PEB will be chaired by the
- Project Exploitation Manager, and composed by the Exploitation
- Managers of each partner. It will monitor the state of the art in
- the domains of content-based information technologies, W3C activities,
- Web publishing, and digital libraries. It will be responsible for
- planning the dissemination and exploitation strategies for the
- consortium, to be approved by the PCC.</dd>
-
- <dt>Work-package Teams</dt>
- <dd>They are constituted of the technical contributors.
- Each team will be chaired by a Work-package Leader, and it will be in
- charge of carrying out the technical work described in Section
- \ref{Workpackages}.</dd>
- </dl>
-
- <h2>Decision Process</h2>
- <p>Decisions will normally be taken by seeking consensus. However,
- after a reasonable amount of time has been allowed to illustrate
- and defend of conflicting positions, in order to avoid deadlock
- in project operational progress, the approval of two-third majority
- of the partners will be sufficient. If the decision being taken
- is unacceptable
- to partners found in the minority positions, the resolution of the
- conflict will be elevated to each partner's higher executive level.
- If no resolution is possible, than the standard ``red flag'' procedure
- will be used, as a last resort. Either the PCC or the Project Manager
- can initiate the conflict resolution procedure.</p>
-
- <h2>Information Flow</h2>
- <p>Information flow within the Project will be ensured by exchange of
- internal technical papers, notification of relevant new publications
- technologies or standards, and reports from external meetings.
- All technical documentation generated by the project should be
- exchangeable in electronic format, according to a set of guidelines
- to be agreed at project start-up. The project Manager will enforce
- adherence to these guidelines. Only strictly formal correspondence
- will be exchanged by ordinary mail and telefax. Urgent correspondence
- over e-mail will be sent with a request for explicit acknowledgement.</p>
- <p>The Coordinating Partner will be responsible to prepare and maintain
- a Web page of the project and a CVS repository (also available via Web).
- The CVS repository is meant to keep the trace of the overall
- progress of the Project, and it will be used by the PCC to monitor
- the state of advancement of the work. Each partner periodically
- submit reports to the prime contractor, listing all technical
- contributions, publications, meeting attendance and other information
- which may help in understanding the provided effort and cost figures.</p>
- <p>The Project will establish a high quality Web site for internal and
- external communications. It will be operational as from one month of
- the commencement date and will be maintained during the project duration.
- The ``members only'' area will include e.g. all private deliverables,
- progress and management reports, and cost statements. The open area will
- include
- the project presentation as defined in Appendix 2 of the ``Guidelines
- for Contract Preparation'' document, all public deliverables, and any
- relevant information suggested by the Project Exploitation Board.</p>
-
- <h2>Quality Procedures</h2>
- <p>For all deliverables, the following review procedure
- will be adopted: release by the Work-Package Leader, two-week review
- period for comments by the PCC, two-week amendment period to incorporate
- PCC recommendations, one-week balloting period for approval by the
- PCC.</p>
-
- <h2>Confidentiality and IPR handling</h2>
- <p>Matters related to Confidentiality and IPR handling will be defined
- in the ``Consortium Agreement''. As regards literature papers
- originated from work in the Project, there will be two
- categories of papers:</p>
- <ol>
- <li>Project Endorsed Publications, requiring notification and approval by
- the PCC.</li>
- <li>Project-related publications, only requiring notification to
- the PCC. They must contain an acknowledgement of support by the
- project Consortium and, if required by the PCC, a disclaimer that
- the views are not necessarily those of the Consortium.</li>
- </ol>
- <p>Concerning possible contributions to Standards, they will be
- directly submitted by project members.</p>
- </body>
-</html>
+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Project Objectives</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Project Objectives</h1>
- <p>The new frontier of Content Based Information Systems is the so called
- ``Semantic Web'' (see
- <a href="publications/others/w3c_bl98.html">others/w3c_bl98</a>).
- Associating meaning with content or establishing a layer of machine
- understandable data will allow automated agents, sophisticated search
- engines and interoperable services and will enable higher degree
- of automation and more intelligent applications. The ultimate goal of the
- Semantic Web is to allow machines to share and exploit knowledge in the
- Web way, i.e. without central authority, with few basic rules, in a
- scalable, adaptable, extensible manner. However, the actual development
- of the Semantic Web and its technologies has been hindered so far by the
- lack of large scale, distributed repositories of structured, content
- oriented information. The case of Mathematical knowledge, the most
- rigorous and condensed form of knowledge, is paradigmatic. The World Wide
- Web is already now the largest single resource of mathematical knowledge,
- and its importance will be exponentiated by the emerging display
- technologies like MathML. However, almost all mathematical documents
- available on the Web are marked up only for presentation (in this respect,
- current practice in MathML improves on, but does not fundamentally differ
- from the older paper-oriented markup schemes like LaTeX or Postscript).
- A consequence of this is that the online material is machine-readable, but
- not machine-understandable, severely crippling the possibility to offer
- added-value services like</p>
- <ul>
- <li>Preservation of the real informative content in a highly structured and
- machine understandable format, suitable for transformation, automatic
- elaboration and processing.</li>
- <li>Cut and paste on the level of computation (take the output from a Web
- search engine and paste it into a computer algebra system).</li>
- <li>Automatic proof checking of published proofs.</li>
- <li>Semantical search for mathematical concepts (rather than keywords).</li>
- <li>Classification: given a concrete mathematical structure, is there a
- general theory for it?</li>
- </ul>
- <p>Due to its rich notational, logical and semantical structure, mathematical
- knowledge is thus a main case study for the development of the new
- generation of semantic Web systems. The aim of the proposed project is
- both to help in this process, as well as pave the way towards a really
- useful virtual, distributed, hyper-textual resource for the working
- mathematician, scientist or engineer. All modern sciences have a
- strongly mathematicised core, and will benefit. The real market and
- application area for the techniques developed in this project, apart from
- the obvious realm of education, lies with high-tech and engineering
- corporations that rely on huge formula databases. Currently, both the
- content markup as well as the added-value services alluded to above are
- very underdeveloped, limiting the usefulness of the vital knowledge. The
- infrastructure and knowhow needed for mining this information treasure
- and obtaining a competitive edge in development is exactly what we are
- attempting to develop in our project.</p>
- <p>Several languages have been already proposed for the management of
- mathematical information on the Web, both for publishing, communication
- and archiving purposes: most notably,
- <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/">MathML</a>,
- <a href="http://www.nag.co.uk/projects/openmath/omsoc/">OpenMath</a>,
- <a href="http://www.mathweb.org/omdoc/">OMDoc</a>. Other languages
- must be also considered for definition and specification of Metadata,
- such as the <a href="http://purl.org/dc/">Dublin Core</a> System, or
- the Resource Description Framework
- [<a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a>].
- All these languages, which tend to cover different and orthogonal aspects
- of the management of mathematical documents, must be eventually taken into
- account for the ambitious goal of our project. One of our aims is actually
- the definition of a modular architecture which could exploit the
- distinctive potentialities of each one of these languages, integrating
- them into a single application. The integration is in this case
- facilitated by the fact that all the languages mentioned are particular
- instances of XML, providing the opportunity to use standard XML
- technology, and in particular XSL Transformations or
- stylesheets [<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>], to pass from
- one language to the other.</p>
-
- <img border="0" alt="Architecture" src="./../images/arch.png" />
-
- <p>The fact of encoding also the microscopic, logical level of mathematics
- opens the possibility to have completely formalised subsystems of the
- library, which could be checked automatically by standard tools for the
- automation of formal reasoning and the mechanisation of mathematics
- (proof assistants and logical frameworks, see
- <a href="publications/others/cup_hp91.html">others/cup_hp91</a> and
- <a href="publications/others/cup_hp93.html">others/cup_hp93</a>). At
- the same time, any of these tools could be used as an authoring system for
- documents of the library, by simply exporting their internal libraries
- into XML, and using stylesheets to transform the output into a standard,
- machine-understandable representation, such as MathML content markup or
- OpenMath.</p>
- <p>The precise formal content can still be preserved by the machinery of
- <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/">Xlinks</a>. Moreover, stylesheets
- can be also used to solve the annoying notational problem that usually
- afflicts formal mathematics, providing a simple way for adding
- user-defined styles and notations.</p>
-
- <p>So, our approach leads to a natural integration of proof assistant tools
- and the Web. In this integration, the emphasis is just on ``content'':
- we do not try to link directly the specific applications to the Web,
- that would be a major mistake, for obvious modularity reasons. On the
- contrary, we adopt XML as a neutral specification language, and then we
- merely work on XML-documents, forgetting the underlying application. In
- this way, similar software tools can be applied to different logical
- dialects, regardless of their concrete nature. Moreover, if having a
- common representation layer is not the ultimate solution to all
- inter-operability problems between different applications, it is
- however a first and essential step in this direction. Finally, this
- ``standardisation'' process should naturally lead to a substantial
- simplification and re-organisation of the current, ``monolithic''
- architecture of logical frameworks. All the many different and often
- loosely connected functionalities of these complex programs (proof
- checking, editing, search and consulting, program extraction, and so on)
- could be clearly split in more or less autonomous tasks, and could be
- developed by different teams, in totally different languages. This is
- the new, ``content-based'' architectural design of future systems.</p>
- </body>
-</html>
+++ /dev/null
-<?xml version="1.0"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-
-<html>
- <head>
- <title>Project Summary</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- <h1>Project Summary</h1>
-
- <h2>Objectives</h2>
- <p>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, ...).</p>
-
- <h2>Description of Work</h2>
- <p>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.</p>
- <p>In particular, we shall deeply explore the potentialities of XML in the
- following directions:</p>
-
- <dl>
- <dt>Publishing</dt>
- <dd>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.</dd>
-
- <dt>Searching and Retrieving</dt>
- <dd>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.</dd>
-
- <dt>Interoperability</dt>
- <dd>Disposing of a common, machine understandable layer is a major and
- essential step in this direction.</dd>
-
- <dt>Distribution</dt>
- <dd>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.</dd>
- </dl>
-
- <p>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.</p>
-
- <h2>Milestones and Expected Results</h2>
- <dl>
- <dt>First MOWGLI prototype (month 18)</dt>
- <dd>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.</dd>
-
- <dt>Advanced MOWGLI prototype (month 24)</dt>
- <dd>Supporting distribution, indexing, searching and retrieval (based on a
- sophisticated metadata model).</dd>
-
- <dt>Final MOWGLI prototype (month 30)</dt>
- <dd>Result of validation.</dd>
- </dl>
-
- </body>
-</html>
-
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Contribution to policies of the European Community</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Community added value and contribution to EC policies</h1>
+ <p>The Project relies in an essential way on the convergence of information
+ processing, communication and new media, meeting the main policy issue of
+ the IST programme. In fact, due to its very nature, mathematical
+ information is particularly suited to an integrated analysis under the
+ different perspectives of elaboration, communication and (hyper)media
+ publishing, providing a main arena for innovative experiments and
+ solutions, especially in view of the new technological frontier of the
+ Semantic Web.</p>
+ <p>The Project also tries to answer to a clear need for wider
+ interoperability and coherence in the realm of mathematics over the Web,
+ especially for educational, scientific and commercial purposes.</p>
+ <p>Electronic textbooks are rapidly becoming a main tool for education and
+ knowledge dissemination. Electronic textbooks must be interactive,
+ allowing intercommunication between the text and scientific software and
+ graphics. This is very hard to achieve starting form a mere presentational
+ description of the information, clearly requiring a sophisticated
+ semantical description of the content.</p>
+ <p>Similarly, the academic and commercial research communities generate large
+ volume of dense scientific material. Increasingly, research publications
+ are being stored in databases, especially for those areas of physics and
+ mathematics where academic journal prices have been growing at an
+ unsustainable rate. Still, however, the information is stored in a format
+ which is machine readable but not machine understandable; in particular it
+ is not suitable for any form of elaboration other than its rendering.
+ MOWGLI's content and metadata levels are exactly meant to address complex
+ elaboration requirements, and to facilitate the maintenance and
+ operability of large document collections, for which automatic searching
+ and indexing are crucial.</p>
+ <p>Corporate and academic scientists and engineers also use technical
+ documents in their work to collaborate, to record results of experiments
+ and computer simulations, and to verify calculations. The Web is,
+ potentially, the natural media for sharing this information; MOWGLI is
+ meant to provide the basic technology to transform this potentiality into
+ an actual possibility.</p>
+ <p>Commercial publishers are also involved with mathematics on the Web at all
+ levels from electronic versions of printed books to interactive textbooks
+ and academic journals. In this case, MOWGLI offers support for advanced
+ capabilities, such as browsing, interactivity, presentational and
+ stylistic customisation, and advanced searching and retrieving
+ features.</p>
+ <p>The project deals with problems traditionally belonging to different
+ scientific communities: digital libraries, Web publishing, automation of
+ mathematics and computer aided reasoning. Any serious solution needs a
+ coordinated effort of all these groups and a synergy of their different
+ expertise. The members of the consortium have been also carefully chosen
+ for their experience in the above mentioned areas. From this interaction,
+ we expect to develop new technologies and solutions, <i>fostering
+ innovation</i> towards the construction of the Semantic Web.</p>
+ <p>MOWGLI contributes in the <i>spread of information and know-how</i>, since
+ new information technologies will be applied to realms such as education
+ and publishing, which are traditionally not very inclined to innovation.
+ More <i>competitiveness</i> will be acquired both by the end users of the
+ system and by the technology providers, which will eventually profit by
+ the expertise gained by applying new and emerging technologies to the huge
+ and compelling problem of the management of mathematical documents over
+ the Web.</p>
+ <p>By opening new perspectives in the domains of interactive publishing and
+ education, MOWGLI suggests <i>new job-profiles</i> in these domains, and
+ <i>increases job opportunities</i> in the Information Society sector.</p>
+ <p>Finally, the <i>social and cultural cohesion</i> of Europe is eventually
+ strengthened by the creation of a large distributed repositories of
+ scientific knowledge.</p>
+
+ <h1>Contribution to Community Social Objectives</h1>
+ <p>The quality of life, in a civilised country, strictly depends on the
+ quality of its services, and in particular on the attention devoted to
+ those services aimed to preserve, increase and make accessible to a wider
+ audience its cultural and scientific heritage. Building a user friendly
+ Information Society, with particular emphasis on digital heritage,
+ cultural content and education is indeed a main social objective of the
+ European Community.</p>
+ <p>The new Information Society is essentially based on the convergence of
+ information, communication and networking technologies and takes
+ advantage of infrastructures like the Internet and the Web.</p>
+ <p>Our project builds on these grounds, to create the technological
+ infrastructure required for the creation and maintenance of a digital
+ knowledge base of <i>structured</i> mathematical information, universally
+ and seamlessly accessible to all people, and in particular to students and
+ professionals, through interoperable, dependable and affordable products
+ and services.</p>
+ <p>From the educational point of view, our system could easily become a main
+ tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical
+ knowledge. Indeed, its interactive nature, and the possibility to access
+ single information units, and possibly applying them, provides a more
+ operational and far less abstract comprehension of mathematical entities,
+ and should naturally induce the user to play with the knowledge base,
+ assembling components in the development of new theorems and results.
+ From the educational point of view, our system could easily become a main
+ tool for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical
+ knowledge. Indeed, its interactive nature, and the possibility to access
+ single information units, and possibly applying them, provides a more
+ operational and far less abstract comprehension of mathematical entities,
+ and should naturally induce the user to play with the knowledge base,
+ assembling components in the development of new theorems and results.</p>
+ <p>From the point of view of employment and development of individual skills,
+ there are two different aspects to be considered, according to the
+ <i>objectives</i> and the <i>methodology</i> of the project.</p>
+ <p>From the methodological point of view, the project makes an essential use
+ of technologies which are the very foundations of the information society,
+ driving their development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating
+ their take up in Europe. In particular, we shall build on most of the
+ recent recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), like XML,
+ DOM, XSL, XLL, MathML, RDF, etc. testing their applicability to the
+ definition of a comprehensive, integrated description of a given field of
+ knowledge.</p>
+ <p>This kind of tools and techniques is of crucial importance in the
+ development of the Web and of the Information Technology of the next
+ years, and our project could play a major role in their dissemination in
+ Europe, and in training people in their use.</p>
+ <p>On the other side, MOWGLI itself could become a major source of
+ inspiration for the re-invention of existing activities, and in particular
+ for the exploitation of new business in the publishing market. Currently,
+ digital journals just offer purely textual objects: our project could
+ help to define new market possibility for content-based publishing (i.e.
+ structured, possibly formal mathematical developments), with all the
+ potentialities offered by this approach, from browsing facilities, to the
+ personalisation of the style, from enhanced forms of searching, to more
+ or less arbitrarily complex forms of elaboration.</p>
+ <p>Our system also opens new perspectives on the mechanisation of mathematics
+ and the automation of formal reasoning. The growing complexity of advanced
+ technological projects (in the areas of electronic and avionic
+ engineering, for example) has recently arose a renewed interest in formal
+ methods. From this respect, our project contributes to build an essential
+ infrastructure for the exploitation of these methods, providing a major
+ help for professionals, and fostering their skills.</p>
+ <p>Let us finally remark that the project has no negative impact on the
+ natural environment. We could even claim a few benefits, related to the
+ electronic distribution of documents, such as the minimisation in the use
+ of means of conveyance and the saving of paper.</p>
+ <p>The possible customisation via suitable style-sheets of <i>structured</i>
+ electronic documents could also meet the needs of particular users, such
+ as disabled (in particular, disabled students) or elderly (as retired
+ researchers who would like to continue their professional activity),
+ providing at the same time comfortable working conditions (e.g. at home).
+ Another general design requirement is the ability to render mathematical
+ material in other media such as speech or braille, which is extremely
+ important for the visually impaired.</p>
+ <p>In conclusion, the aim of our work is to contribute to the creation of the
+ next generation of user-friendly, dependable and interoperable
+ general-interest services, meeting user demands for flexible access, for
+ everybody, from anywhere, at any time.</p>
+
+ </body>
+</html>
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Contribution to programme/key action objectives</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Contribution to programme/key action objectives</h1>
+ <p>The Project contributes to build a user friendly information society, and
+ in particular it meets the following general objectives of this
+ program:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>(multimedia content) confirming Europe as a leading force in this field,
+ realizing the potential of its creativity and culture;</li>
+ <li>(essential technologies and infrastructure) enabling technologies which
+ are the foundations of the information society, driving their
+ development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating their take
+ up in Europe.</li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>As a matter of fact, the project is based in an essential way on the use
+ of most part of the recent recommendations of the World Wide Web
+ Organization for Web publishing and human-computer interaction (XML, XSL,
+ XLL, Namespaces, MathML, RDF, etc.). In particular, we aim to prove how
+ all these specifications naturally fit together, when trying to build a
+ full, integrated description (comprising content, notation, metadata,
+ etc.) of a given field of knowledge. At our knowledge, the project is the
+ first of the kind, and could become a paradigmatic example in the
+ integrated use of these technologies.</p>
+ <p>The project also addresses most of the issues of the multimedia content
+ key action, namely: electronic publishing, digital heritage and cultural
+ content, education, information access, filtering and handling. Actually,
+ all these aspects are and must be covered in our project, in order to
+ reach our objectives. In particular, the educational potential of our
+ system should not be neglected either: it could become an essential tool
+ for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge. For
+ instance, if supported by a suitable technology, proving theorems in a
+ proof assistant could be as amusing as playing a video game. We imagine
+ bunches of young researchers contributing to the free development of the
+ library for the mere gratification of seeing their name as actual editor
+ (or, why not, original author) of a specific fragment.</p>
+ <p>Finally, the project is particularly related to the specific key-action
+ III.2.3 (access to scientific and cultural heritage). In fact, the aim
+ of our system is exactly to improve access by students and professionals
+ to the fast-growing mathematical knowledge base, allowing mathematical
+ documents to be retrieved, served, and processed directly on the Web. More
+ over, our system is meant to be compatible with most of the existing tools
+ for the mechanisation of mathematics and the automation of formal
+ reasoning (proof assistants and logical frameworks). The possibility to
+ build coherent sub-libraries of formal mathematical developments would
+ provide an essential (and unique) added value to the library itself,
+ making of Europe a leader in this area.</p>
+ <p>Maybe, having the possibility to process, analyse and elaborate
+ mathematical structures as data, the time will come when we shall finally
+ be able to start a completely new and exciting field of research on
+ mathematics: namely a scientific, empirical study on the <i>real</i>
+ structure of mathematical entities, and the ``way of thinking'' of
+ mathematicians.</p>
+ </body>
+</html>
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects</h1>
+
+ <h2>Identification of exploitable results</h2>
+ <p>MOWGLI is meant to develop, evaluate, fine-tune and deliver a complete
+ prototype supporting friendly and interactive access to huge, distributed
+ repositories of content-based mathematical knowledge. The purpose of the
+ project is to overcome some of the main obstacles that currently hinder a
+ wider dissemination of Information Technologies in the mathematical and
+ research community (comprising both professionals and students). This is
+ intended as a public service for the whole community of users, and we
+ expect no direct commercial profit by our work.</p>
+ <p>Of course, the core technologies and languages developed in MOWGLI may be
+ exploited in a lot of different ways, according to the nature and
+ exploitation plan of each partner.</p>
+ <p>In particular, it should be clear that having a coherent, distributed
+ library of structured mathematical knowledge, saved in a clearly defined,
+ well documented and application independent format, is just the starting
+ point of a wider, potentially enormous process. Building on the grounds
+ provided by MOWGLI, a lot of different services can be imagined, and
+ independently developed by different organisations. Inside the project, we
+ shall just give a few hints in this direction, supporting advanced and
+ interactive forms of searching and navigation, as well as automatic
+ validation facilities, for suitable fragments of the library.</p>
+
+ <h2>Target Market</h2>
+ <p>The main target market of MOWGLI is education. Here, the potentiality
+ offered by a semantic description of the information for the development
+ of interactive, electronic textbooks are enormous. In particular, the
+ MOWGLI prototype could become an essential tool for a wider and more
+ friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge.</p>
+ <p>A second, potential market is Publishing. Digital libraries currently
+ suffers from clear limitations due to the machine-readable but not
+ machine understandable encoding of the information. No other kind of
+ elaboration than displaying or printing is usually possible. There is no
+ possibility of cut-and paste, formal checking, complex searching. For
+ instance, we cannot write a spider going around searching for a proof with
+ a given template, because there is not structure, and in particular no
+ semantics inside the text.</p>
+ <p>A third market are industries specialised in formal verification and
+ security. These industries are usually asked to check a given system or
+ protocol for security issues or formal validation of functional/temporal
+ behaviour. The result of the formalisation work and its automatic
+ validation is typically in an internal format which is obscure even to
+ experts. Studying the possibility to automatically generate a more
+ friendly presentation in usual mathematical notation is thus a major
+ topic.</p>
+
+ <h2>Consortium's Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy</h2>
+ <p>According to the Project Workplan, a considerable effort will be devoted
+ to the dissemination/exploitation of the results. During the first six
+ months, the consortium will undertake the development and execution of a
+ workplan to achieve successful dissemination of the project results. In
+ particular, the very nature of the project suggests to involve the
+ largest community of professionals during the modelling phase. Here, we
+ shall be open to any contribution, even soliciting them, still keeping
+ final technical decisions inside the Project.
+ <br/>
+ The foreseen dissemination steps include:</p>
+
+ <ol>
+ <li>Preparation of an ``information pack'', including a folder and CDROM
+ with demos.</li>
+ <li>Presentation of MOWGLI to national and international conferences on
+ I.T.Technologies.</li>
+ <li>Presentation of MOWGLI to thematic conferences on Education, Digital
+ Libraries, Formal Verification and so on.</li>
+ <li>Advertising to actors/institutions which may be direct users or may
+ channel the information to final users (such as the World Wide Web
+ Consortium).</li>
+ <li>Technical papers and articles to be sent to specialised reviews.</li>
+ <li>Management of the MOWGLI Web site.</li>
+ <li>Dissemination of technical achievements in specific scientific
+ communities, such as XML-related interests groups.</li>
+ </ol>
+
+ <p>Management of the Exploitation and Dissemination activities is a specific
+ Work-package that will be lead by the Project Exploitation Board. It is
+ planned that all partners will nominate qualified persons as exploitation
+ managers to coordinate their own exploitation activities. The Exploitation
+ Board will be in charge of the preparation of the exploitation and
+ dissemination plan.</p>
+
+ </body>
+</html>
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Innovation</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Innovation</h1>
+ <p>The main technical novelty of the project is in its synergy of different
+ scientific communities and research topics: digital libraries, Web
+ publishing, logical environments.</p>
+
+ <img border="0" alt="Architecture" src="./../../images/logo.png" />
+
+ <p>From the point of view of Web publishing, our project is the first attempt
+ 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. To
+ this aim, we shall put to use most of the technologies recently introduced
+ by the W3C: XML, DOM, XSL, XLL, Namespaces, MathML, RDF, etc. From this
+ respect, the project is first of all a complex test for all these
+ technologies, and should hopefully become an example of ``best practice''
+ in their use. Note that the final architecture is likely to be extendible
+ to other fields of structured information: the emphasis on mathematics is
+ motivated by the fact that, due to its complex interplay between content,
+ structure and notation, it provides a major case study for Web-based
+ information systems (it is not a case that MathML has been one of few
+ instances of XML completely developed under the aegis of the World Wide
+ Web Consortium).</p>
+ <p>From the point of view of digital libraries, our work is aimed at
+ exploiting all the potential functionalities offered by the Web, and in
+ particular a more integrated use of its browsing and searching facilities.
+ The library is not merely seen as a more or less structured collection of
+ texts, but as a virtual structure inside which we can freely navigate,
+ jumping for instance from an entity to its definition, or peeping inside
+ some information at deeper and deeper levels of details (such as different
+ levels of detail of a proof). This is similar to what we currently do
+ with HTML texts, but in order to enhance the effectiveness of the
+ consultation, we clearly need a good metadata model of the information.
+ Moreover, in such an integrated view, it is hardly conceivable to just
+ apply some ``general purpose'' metadata model (like the Dublin Core
+ system, say): the metadata model must be eventually specialised to the
+ actual structure of the information it is supposed to model (and more
+ structure we have on the information, more relevant metadata we can
+ usually infer on the document). For instance, metadata could contain the
+ whole signature of a given module of mathematical knowledge. The usual
+ motivation for keeping metadata simple and general is that it is usually
+ difficult to add this information by hand; but in our case a large part of
+ the metadata is supposed to be extracted automatically by the (structured)
+ text itself, allowing for pretty complex metadata models.</p>
+ <p>Finally, a main aspect of our project is the integration with current
+ tools for the automation of formal reasoning and mechanisation of
+ mathematics (proof assistants and logical frameworks). This integration
+ has a mutual benefit. From the point of view of the mathematical library,
+ the first and fundamental role of these systems is that of providing
+ friendly authoring tools (for instance, our ``core'' library will be
+ automatically extracted from existing libraries of these systems). The
+ relevance of this point should not be underestimated: as a matter of fact,
+ the main reason for the failure of complex markup modellings is usually
+ the lack of suitable authoring tools (it is often painful to add the
+ markup by hand). Of course, they can also provide other functionalities
+ (like automatic proof checking) on fragments of the library (typically,
+ the fragments generated by the tool itself, in its specific logical
+ dialect). These additional functionalities may be especially relevant for
+ industrial applications, e.g. in the context of IT security evaluation
+ standards like the Common Criteria standard (see
+ <a href="./../publications/others/cc.html">others/cc</a>). In its highest
+ assurance level, this standard requires the development of formal models
+ of the IT product under evaluation, as well as mechanized proofs that it
+ meets its security objectives. Such models and proofs must be published in
+ a format that can be easily readable and understood by security
+ evaluators. Hence, there is a strong need from software industry to be
+ able to produce such documentation directly from the models introduced in
+ the proof assistant, and to link it with documents describing the IT
+ product, etc.</p>
+ <p>On the other side, there is a compelling need of integration between the
+ current tools for automation of formal reasoning and mechanisation of
+ mathematics and the most recent technologies for the development of Web
+ applications and electronic publishing. XML, which is rapidly imposing as
+ a pivotal technology in the future development of all Internet
+ applications, and the main tool for representation, manipulation, and
+ exchange of structured information in the networked age, looks as a
+ natural, almost mandatory, choice for modelling the information.</p>
+ <p>In this way, we just obey to the very primitive commandment of the Web:
+ make your information available. Currently, libraries in logical
+ frameworks are usually saved in two formats: a textual one, in the
+ specific tactical language of the proof assistant, and a compiled (proof
+ checked) one in some internal, concrete representation language. Both
+ representations are obviously unsatisfactory, since they are too oriented
+ to the specific application: they restrict the access of the libraries to
+ the users of the given application, and at the same time they are too
+ sensible to the evolution and the maintenance of the application itself.
+ On the other side, as soon as the information is put in a standard format
+ on the Web, <i>any</i> kind of research becomes virtually possible, and
+ <i>anybody</i> could start developing his own <i>spider</i> for
+ implementing his own searching requirements. This is clearly a major
+ improvement w.r.t. the present situation. Currently, you must not only
+ rely on the searching facilities offered by the specific applications, but
+ even if you would wish to implement your own searching algorithm, you
+ would be prevented by the simple reason that the information is not
+ accessible (in any reasonable sense of the word).</p>
+ <p>The project builds on the solid ground provided by several existing
+ XML-based languages for the management of mathematical documents such as
+ MathML, OpenMath and OMDoc. Each of these markup languages covers a
+ different aspect of the information. Our aim is not to propose a new
+ language, but to study and to develop the technological infrastructure
+ required to integrate all these languages together, in order to take
+ advantage of the specific features of each of them.</p>
+
+ </body>
+</html>
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Project Management</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Project Management</h1>
+ <p>The Project management will be assured by the following relevant
+ roles:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>Project Manager</li>
+ <li>Exploitation manager</li>
+ <li>Work-package Leaders</li>
+ <li>Technical Contributors</li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>and by the following Project Bodies:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>Project Coordination Committee (PCC)</li>
+ <li>Project Exploitation Board</li>
+ <li>Work-package Teams.</li>
+ </ol>
+ <dl>
+ <dt>Project Manager</dt>
+ <dd>The mandate of the Project Manager is
+ to represent the Project, report to the Commission, monitor
+ overall performance of the project, ensure accomplishment
+ of the technical objectives, promote project visibility,
+ promote dissemination of project results in the relevant international
+ forums, promote acceptance of project results, administer
+ project resources and monitor project spending.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Exploitation Manager</dt>
+ <dd>S/he will be responsible for coordinating
+ exploitation activities undertaken by the Project Exploitation Board
+ (PEB) in close cooperation with the Project Coordination Committee
+ (PCC).</dd>
+
+ <dt>Work-package Leaders</dt>
+ <dd>They are responsible for the performance of
+ Work-packages, and they must be committed to the Work-package for at
+ least five man months per year.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Technical Contributors</dt>
+ <dd>Technical Contributors are specialised
+ staff provided by the partners. They could be either people active on
+ a stable basis into a Work-package, or people who contribute from time
+ to time on specific tasks related to the work-plan (external
+ contributors).</dd>
+
+ <dt>Project Coordination Committee</dt>
+ <dd>The PCC is chaired by the Project
+ Manager and constituted by one representative from each Partner, and
+ is the main decision body of the Consortium. It is in charge
+ of all formal decisions regarding technical direction of the work,
+ proper interrelation between Work-packages,
+ relations with IST Office, policies for promotion of results,
+ administrative arrangements. In view of minimising management overhead
+ and project costs, partners providing the Project Manager,
+ and the Work-packages Leaders are required to appoint the same
+ person as their official representative in the Project
+ Coordination Committee.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Project Exploitation Board</dt>
+ <dd>The PEB will be chaired by the
+ Project Exploitation Manager, and composed by the Exploitation
+ Managers of each partner. It will monitor the state of the art in
+ the domains of content-based information technologies, W3C activities,
+ Web publishing, and digital libraries. It will be responsible for
+ planning the dissemination and exploitation strategies for the
+ consortium, to be approved by the PCC.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Work-package Teams</dt>
+ <dd>They are constituted of the technical contributors.
+ Each team will be chaired by a Work-package Leader, and it will be in
+ charge of carrying out the technical work described in Section
+ \ref{Workpackages}.</dd>
+ </dl>
+
+ <h2>Decision Process</h2>
+ <p>Decisions will normally be taken by seeking consensus. However,
+ after a reasonable amount of time has been allowed to illustrate
+ and defend of conflicting positions, in order to avoid deadlock
+ in project operational progress, the approval of two-third majority
+ of the partners will be sufficient. If the decision being taken
+ is unacceptable
+ to partners found in the minority positions, the resolution of the
+ conflict will be elevated to each partner's higher executive level.
+ If no resolution is possible, than the standard ``red flag'' procedure
+ will be used, as a last resort. Either the PCC or the Project Manager
+ can initiate the conflict resolution procedure.</p>
+
+ <h2>Information Flow</h2>
+ <p>Information flow within the Project will be ensured by exchange of
+ internal technical papers, notification of relevant new publications
+ technologies or standards, and reports from external meetings.
+ All technical documentation generated by the project should be
+ exchangeable in electronic format, according to a set of guidelines
+ to be agreed at project start-up. The project Manager will enforce
+ adherence to these guidelines. Only strictly formal correspondence
+ will be exchanged by ordinary mail and telefax. Urgent correspondence
+ over e-mail will be sent with a request for explicit acknowledgement.</p>
+ <p>The Coordinating Partner will be responsible to prepare and maintain
+ a Web page of the project and a CVS repository (also available via Web).
+ The CVS repository is meant to keep the trace of the overall
+ progress of the Project, and it will be used by the PCC to monitor
+ the state of advancement of the work. Each partner periodically
+ submit reports to the prime contractor, listing all technical
+ contributions, publications, meeting attendance and other information
+ which may help in understanding the provided effort and cost figures.</p>
+ <p>The Project will establish a high quality Web site for internal and
+ external communications. It will be operational as from one month of
+ the commencement date and will be maintained during the project duration.
+ The ``members only'' area will include e.g. all private deliverables,
+ progress and management reports, and cost statements. The open area will
+ include
+ the project presentation as defined in Appendix 2 of the ``Guidelines
+ for Contract Preparation'' document, all public deliverables, and any
+ relevant information suggested by the Project Exploitation Board.</p>
+
+ <h2>Quality Procedures</h2>
+ <p>For all deliverables, the following review procedure
+ will be adopted: release by the Work-Package Leader, two-week review
+ period for comments by the PCC, two-week amendment period to incorporate
+ PCC recommendations, one-week balloting period for approval by the
+ PCC.</p>
+
+ <h2>Confidentiality and IPR handling</h2>
+ <p>Matters related to Confidentiality and IPR handling will be defined
+ in the ``Consortium Agreement''. As regards literature papers
+ originated from work in the Project, there will be two
+ categories of papers:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>Project Endorsed Publications, requiring notification and approval by
+ the PCC.</li>
+ <li>Project-related publications, only requiring notification to
+ the PCC. They must contain an acknowledgement of support by the
+ project Consortium and, if required by the PCC, a disclaimer that
+ the views are not necessarily those of the Consortium.</li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Concerning possible contributions to Standards, they will be
+ directly submitted by project members.</p>
+ </body>
+</html>
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Project Objectives</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Project Objectives</h1>
+ <p>The new frontier of Content Based Information Systems is the so called
+ ``Semantic Web'' (see
+ <a href="./../publications/others/w3c_bl98.html">others/w3c_bl98</a>).
+ Associating meaning with content or establishing a layer of machine
+ understandable data will allow automated agents, sophisticated search
+ engines and interoperable services and will enable higher degree
+ of automation and more intelligent applications. The ultimate goal of the
+ Semantic Web is to allow machines to share and exploit knowledge in the
+ Web way, i.e. without central authority, with few basic rules, in a
+ scalable, adaptable, extensible manner. However, the actual development
+ of the Semantic Web and its technologies has been hindered so far by the
+ lack of large scale, distributed repositories of structured, content
+ oriented information. The case of Mathematical knowledge, the most
+ rigorous and condensed form of knowledge, is paradigmatic. The World Wide
+ Web is already now the largest single resource of mathematical knowledge,
+ and its importance will be exponentiated by the emerging display
+ technologies like MathML. However, almost all mathematical documents
+ available on the Web are marked up only for presentation (in this respect,
+ current practice in MathML improves on, but does not fundamentally differ
+ from the older paper-oriented markup schemes like LaTeX or Postscript).
+ A consequence of this is that the online material is machine-readable, but
+ not machine-understandable, severely crippling the possibility to offer
+ added-value services like</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Preservation of the real informative content in a highly structured and
+ machine understandable format, suitable for transformation, automatic
+ elaboration and processing.</li>
+ <li>Cut and paste on the level of computation (take the output from a Web
+ search engine and paste it into a computer algebra system).</li>
+ <li>Automatic proof checking of published proofs.</li>
+ <li>Semantical search for mathematical concepts (rather than keywords).</li>
+ <li>Classification: given a concrete mathematical structure, is there a
+ general theory for it?</li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>Due to its rich notational, logical and semantical structure, mathematical
+ knowledge is thus a main case study for the development of the new
+ generation of semantic Web systems. The aim of the proposed project is
+ both to help in this process, as well as pave the way towards a really
+ useful virtual, distributed, hyper-textual resource for the working
+ mathematician, scientist or engineer. All modern sciences have a
+ strongly mathematicised core, and will benefit. The real market and
+ application area for the techniques developed in this project, apart from
+ the obvious realm of education, lies with high-tech and engineering
+ corporations that rely on huge formula databases. Currently, both the
+ content markup as well as the added-value services alluded to above are
+ very underdeveloped, limiting the usefulness of the vital knowledge. The
+ infrastructure and knowhow needed for mining this information treasure
+ and obtaining a competitive edge in development is exactly what we are
+ attempting to develop in our project.</p>
+ <p>Several languages have been already proposed for the management of
+ mathematical information on the Web, both for publishing, communication
+ and archiving purposes: most notably,
+ <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/">MathML</a>,
+ <a href="http://www.nag.co.uk/projects/openmath/omsoc/">OpenMath</a>,
+ <a href="http://www.mathweb.org/omdoc/">OMDoc</a>. Other languages
+ must be also considered for definition and specification of Metadata,
+ such as the <a href="http://purl.org/dc/">Dublin Core</a> System, or
+ the Resource Description Framework
+ [<a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a>].
+ All these languages, which tend to cover different and orthogonal aspects
+ of the management of mathematical documents, must be eventually taken into
+ account for the ambitious goal of our project. One of our aims is actually
+ the definition of a modular architecture which could exploit the
+ distinctive potentialities of each one of these languages, integrating
+ them into a single application. The integration is in this case
+ facilitated by the fact that all the languages mentioned are particular
+ instances of XML, providing the opportunity to use standard XML
+ technology, and in particular XSL Transformations or
+ stylesheets [<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">XSLT</a>], to pass from
+ one language to the other.</p>
+
+ <img border="0" alt="Architecture" src="./../../images/arch.png" />
+
+ <p>The fact of encoding also the microscopic, logical level of mathematics
+ opens the possibility to have completely formalised subsystems of the
+ library, which could be checked automatically by standard tools for the
+ automation of formal reasoning and the mechanisation of mathematics
+ (proof assistants and logical frameworks, see
+ <a href="./../publications/others/cup_hp91.html">others/cup_hp91</a> and
+ <a href="./../publications/others/cup_hp93.html">others/cup_hp93</a>). At
+ the same time, any of these tools could be used as an authoring system for
+ documents of the library, by simply exporting their internal libraries
+ into XML, and using stylesheets to transform the output into a standard,
+ machine-understandable representation, such as MathML content markup or
+ OpenMath.</p>
+ <p>The precise formal content can still be preserved by the machinery of
+ <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/">Xlinks</a>. Moreover, stylesheets
+ can be also used to solve the annoying notational problem that usually
+ afflicts formal mathematics, providing a simple way for adding
+ user-defined styles and notations.</p>
+
+ <p>So, our approach leads to a natural integration of proof assistant tools
+ and the Web. In this integration, the emphasis is just on ``content'':
+ we do not try to link directly the specific applications to the Web,
+ that would be a major mistake, for obvious modularity reasons. On the
+ contrary, we adopt XML as a neutral specification language, and then we
+ merely work on XML-documents, forgetting the underlying application. In
+ this way, similar software tools can be applied to different logical
+ dialects, regardless of their concrete nature. Moreover, if having a
+ common representation layer is not the ultimate solution to all
+ inter-operability problems between different applications, it is
+ however a first and essential step in this direction. Finally, this
+ ``standardisation'' process should naturally lead to a substantial
+ simplification and re-organisation of the current, ``monolithic''
+ architecture of logical frameworks. All the many different and often
+ loosely connected functionalities of these complex programs (proof
+ checking, editing, search and consulting, program extraction, and so on)
+ could be clearly split in more or less autonomous tasks, and could be
+ developed by different teams, in totally different languages. This is
+ the new, ``content-based'' architectural design of future systems.</p>
+ </body>
+</html>
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>Project Summary</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <h1>Project Summary</h1>
+
+ <h2>Objectives</h2>
+ <p>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, ...).</p>
+
+ <h2>Description of Work</h2>
+ <p>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.</p>
+ <p>In particular, we shall deeply explore the potentialities of XML in the
+ following directions:</p>
+
+ <dl>
+ <dt>Publishing</dt>
+ <dd>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.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Searching and Retrieving</dt>
+ <dd>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.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Interoperability</dt>
+ <dd>Disposing of a common, machine understandable layer is a major and
+ essential step in this direction.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Distribution</dt>
+ <dd>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.</dd>
+ </dl>
+
+ <p>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.</p>
+
+ <h2>Milestones and Expected Results</h2>
+ <dl>
+ <dt>First MOWGLI prototype (month 18)</dt>
+ <dd>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.</dd>
+
+ <dt>Advanced MOWGLI prototype (month 24)</dt>
+ <dd>Supporting distribution, indexing, searching and retrieval (based on a
+ sophisticated metadata model).</dd>
+
+ <dt>Final MOWGLI prototype (month 30)</dt>
+ <dd>Result of validation.</dd>
+ </dl>
+
+ </body>
+</html>
+
--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <title>MoWGLI Proposal</title>
+ </head>
+
+ <body>
+ <h1>MoWGLI Proposal</h1>
+ <ul>
+ <li><a href="project-summary.html">Summary</a></li>
+ <li><a href="project-objectives.html">Objectives</a></li>
+ <li><a href="project-management.html">Management</a></li>
+ <li><a href="contribution.html">Contribution to programme/key action objectives</a></li>
+ <li><a href="innovation.html">Innovation</a></li>
+ <li><a href="EC-contribution.html">Contribution to policies of the European Community</a></li>
+ <li><a href="econ-scient-tech-prospects.html">Economic development and Scientific and Technological Prospects</a></li>
+ </ul>
+
+ </body>
+
+</html>
projects / helm.git / commitdiff