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7 <title>Contribution to programme/key action objectives</title>
10 <h1>Contribution to programme/key action objectives</h1>
11 <p>The Project contributes to build a user friendly information society, and
12 in particular it meets the following general objectives of this
15 <li>(multimedia content) confirming Europe as a leading force in this field,
16 realizing the potential of its creativity and culture;</li>
17 <li>(essential technologies and infrastructure) enabling technologies which
18 are the foundations of the information society, driving their
19 development, enhancing their applicability, and accelerating their take
22 <p>As a matter of fact, the project is based in an essential way on the use
23 of most part of the recent recommendations of the World Wide Web
24 Organization for Web publishing and human-computer interaction (XML, XSL,
25 XLL, Namespaces, MathML, RDF, etc.). In particular, we aim to prove how
26 all these specifications naturally fit together, when trying to build a
27 full, integrated description (comprising content, notation, metadata,
28 etc.) of a given field of knowledge. At our knowledge, the project is the
29 first of the kind, and could become a paradigmatic example in the
30 integrated use of these technologies.</p>
31 <p>The project also addresses most of the issues of the multimedia content
32 key action, namely: electronic publishing, digital heritage and cultural
33 content, education, information access, filtering and handling. Actually,
34 all these aspects are and must be covered in our project, in order to
35 reach our objectives. In particular, the educational potential of our
36 system should not be neglected either: it could become an essential tool
37 for a wider and more friendly dissemination of mathematical knowledge. For
38 instance, if supported by a suitable technology, proving theorems in a
39 proof assistant could be as amusing as playing a video game. We imagine
40 bunches of young researchers contributing to the free development of the
41 library for the mere gratification of seeing their name as actual editor
42 (or, why not, original author) of a specific fragment.</p>
43 <p>Finally, the project is particularly related to the specific key-action
44 III.2.3 (access to scientific and cultural heritage). In fact, the aim
45 of our system is exactly to improve access by students and professionals
46 to the fast-growing mathematical knowledge base, allowing mathematical
47 documents to be retrieved, served, and processed directly on the Web. More
48 over, our system is meant to be compatible with most of the existing tools
49 for the mechanisation of mathematics and the automation of formal
50 reasoning (proof assistants and logical frameworks). The possibility to
51 build coherent sub-libraries of formal mathematical developments would
52 provide an essential (and unique) added value to the library itself,
53 making of Europe a leader in this area.</p>
54 <p>Maybe, having the possibility to process, analyse and elaborate
55 mathematical structures as data, the time will come when we shall finally
56 be able to start a completely new and exciting field of research on
57 mathematics: namely a scientific, empirical study on the <i>real</i>
58 structure of mathematical entities, and the ``way of thinking'' of