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