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- <title>Contribution to policies of the European Community</title>
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- <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>
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projects / helm.git / blobdiff