5 <title>Project Summary</title>
8 <h1>Project Summary</h1>
11 <p>The World Wide Web is already the largest resource of mathematical
12 knowledge, and its importance will be exponentiated by emerging display
13 technologies like MathML. However, almost all mathematical documents
14 available on the Web are marked up only for presentation, severely
15 crippling the potentialities for automation, interoperability,
16 sophisticated searching mechanisms, intelligent applications,
17 transformation and processing. The goal of the project is to overcome
18 these limitations, passing form a machine-readable to a
19 machine-understandable representation of the information, and developing
20 the technological infrastructure for its exploitation. MOWGLI builds on
21 previous ``standards'' for the management and publishing of mathematical
22 documents (MathML, OpenMath, OMDoc), integrating them with different XML
23 technology (XSLT, RDF, ...).</p>
25 <h2>Description of Work</h2>
26 <p>The goal of the project is to provide a comprehensive description, from
27 content to metadata, of a given field of knowledge (in our case
28 mathematics), in order to enhance its accessibility, exchange and
29 elaboration via the World Wide Web. MOWGLI will make an essential use of
30 standard XML technology and aspires to become an example of ``best
31 practice'' in its use, and a leading project in the new area of the
33 <p>In particular, we shall deeply explore the potentialities of XML in the
34 following directions:</p>
38 <dd>XML offers sophisticated publishing technologies (Stylesheets, MathML,
39 SVG, ...) which can be profitably used to solve, in a standard way, the
40 annoying notational problems that traditionally afflict
41 content based and machine-understandable encodings of the
44 <dt>Searching and Retrieving</dt>
45 <dd>Metadata will play a major role in MOWGLI. New W3C languages such as
46 the Resource Description Framework or XML Query are likely to produce
47 major innovative solutions in this field.</dd>
49 <dt>Interoperability</dt>
50 <dd>Disposing of a common, machine understandable layer is a major and
51 essential step in this direction.</dd>
54 <dd>All XML technology is finally aimed to the access of the Web as a
55 single, distributed resource, with no central authority and few,
59 <p>MOWGLI builds on the solid ground already provided by previous European
60 projects (Such as OpenMAth and Euler) and several XML dialects for the
61 management of mathematical documents (MathML, OpenMath, OMDoc, ...).
62 All these languages cover different and orthogonal aspects of the
63 information; our aim is not to propose a new standard, but to study and
64 to develop the technological infrastructure required for taking advantage
65 of the potentialities of all of them.</p>
67 <h2>Milestones and Expected Results</h2>
69 <dt>First MOWGLI prototype (month 18)</dt>
70 <dd>Supporting browsing, rendering and on-line consultation of large
71 repositories of (content-based) mathematical knowledge. The translation
72 from content to presentation will be done via suitable notational
75 <dt>Advanced MOWGLI prototype (month 24)</dt>
76 <dd>Supporting distribution, indexing, searching and retrieval (based on a
77 sophisticated metadata model).</dd>
79 <dt>Final MOWGLI prototype (month 30)</dt>
80 <dd>Result of validation.</dd>