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-<h1 style="text-align: center">MOWGLI - A New Approach for the Content Description in Digital Documents</h1>
-
-<h2 style="text-align: center">Andrea Asperti, University of Bologna, and Bernd Wegner, TU Berlin</h2>
-
-
-<h2>Abstract:</h2>
-
-<div style="font-style: italic">
-<p>The acronym MOWGLI stands for "Mathematics On the Web: Get it by Logic and
-Interfaces". MOWGLI is an European Project founded by the European Community
-in the ``Information Society Technologies'' (IST) Programme. The partners are
-the University of Bologna, INRIA (Rocquencourt), the German Research Centre
-for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI, Saarbruecken), the Katholieke Universiteit
-Nijmegen, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein
-Institute, Golm), Trusted Logic (Paris) and TU Berlin.</p>
-
-<p>The aim of the project is the study and the development of a technological
-infrastructure for the creation and maintenance of a virtual, distributed,
-hypertextual library of mathematical knowledge based on a content description
-of the information. Currently, 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 MOWGLI is to overcome these limitations, passing from a machine-readable to
-a machine-understandable representation of the information, and developing the
-technological infrastructure for its exploitation.</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 to the complex
-problem of mathematical knowledge management needs a co-ordinated effort of
-all these groups and a synergy of their different expertise. MOWGLI attempts
-to build a solid co-operation environment between these communities. The
-current paper will concentrate on the aspects related to digital libraries.</p>
-</div>
-
-
-<h2>1. Aims and mission of MOWGLI</h2>
-
-<p>After a ten years period of electronic publishing in mathematics we are still
-confronted with slightly enhanced electronic versions of printed publications.
-Almost all mathematical documents available on the Web are marked up only for
-presentation, if such an enhancement is available at all. Only a minority of
-documents try to care about some of the potentialities for automation,
-interoperability, sophisticated searching mechanisms, intelligent
-applications, transformation and processing. But these approaches could be
-considered as first preliminary steps towards an electronic document providing
-all these facilities. Hence, the goal of MOWGLI 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.</p>
-
-<p>In order to reach this goal MOWGLI has to deal with problems traditionally
-belonging to different scientific communities: digital libraries, Web
-publishing, automation of mathematics and computer aided reasoning. To our
-knowledge, MOWGLI is the first attempt to build a solid co-operation
-environment between these communities. In principle, any serious approach for
-providing good tools for mathematical knowledge management needs a
-co-ordinated effort of several partners from the above mentioned communities
-and a synergy of
-their different expertise. The choice of partners for the took this condition
-into account, as can be seen below.</p>
-
-<p>The goals of MOWGLI largely overlap with the aims of the so called "Semantic
-Web" <a href="#14">[14]</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 hopefully be increased by the
-emerging display technologies like MathML.</p>
-
-<p>Machine understandable information will make possible to offer added-value
-services like:
-<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>Semantic search for mathematical concepts (rather than keywords).</li>
- <li>Indexing and Classification.</li>
-</ul>
-</p>
-
-<p>Due to its rich notational, logical and semantic structure, mathematical
-knowledge is a main case study for the development of the new generation of
-semantic Web systems. The aim of the MOWGLI 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.</p>
-
-
-<h2>2. Standards and Tools</h2>
-
-<p>Current standards for electronic publishing in mathematics are mainly
-presentation oriented. New tools for the management and publishing of
-mathematical documents are in development like MathML
-<a href="#3">[3]</a>, OpenMath, OMDoc
-(<a href="#17">[17]</a>,<a href="#18">[18]</a>) and integrated with different
-XML technology <a href="#7">[7]</a> (XSLT <a href="#8">[8]</a>, RDF
-<a href="#4">[4]</a>, <a href="#5">[5]</a>, SOAP <a href="#6">[6]</a>, ...).
-All these languages cover different and orthogonal
-aspects of the information and its management; 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 current
-standards and those which are likely to be established in the near future.</p>
-
-<p>MOWGLI makes an essential use of standard XML technology and aspires to
-become an example of ``best practice'' in its use, and a pioneering leading
-project in the new area of the Semantic Web <a href="#12">[12]</a>.
-In particular, the potentialities of
-XML will be deeply explored in the following directions:
-<ul>
- <li>Publishing. XML offers sophisticated publishing technologies (Stylesheets,
- MathML, SVG, etc.) 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.</li>
- <li>Searching and Retrieving. 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.</li>
- <li>Interoperability. Disposing of a common, machine understandable layer is a
- major and essential step in this direction.</li>
- <li>Distribution. 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.</li>
-</ul>
-</p>
-
-<p>MathML <a href="#3">[3]</a>, introducing for the first time a content markup
-layer in parallel
-with a presentational one, has indubitably been a pioneering project towards
-the mining of the mathematical treasure available on the web. Still, its
-limitations are evident as well:
-<ul>
- <li>MathML is merely focused on mathematical expressions. However, in order to
-bring the idea of a Semantic Web of Mathematics to its full potentialities,
-other layers of mathematical information must be considered as well. In
-particular, we need a clean, microscopic description of proofs, a markup for
-mathematichal "objects" (Theorems, Lemmas, Corollaries, Examples, etc.), a
-markup for "structured collections" of these objects (Documents, Theories,
-etc.), possibly "functors" between these collections, and finally a good
-"metadata" layer.</li>
- <li>MathML is just an (important) piece in a much wider technological puzzle.
-Passing from content to a good presentational format requires sophisticated
-operations; on the other side, these transformations are themselves a basic
-component of the whole mathematical knowledge (like mathematical fonts). XSLT
-<a href="#8">[8]</a> provides here the right technology, opening the way to
-the creation of well maintained and documented libraries of mathematical
-stylesheets <a href="#11">[11]</a>.</li>
-</ul>
-</p>
-
-<p>Similarly, the creation and maintenance of the library as a distributed
-repository, and the crucial aspect of managing the information in the ``web
-way'' requires a light but powerful communication protocol, overcoming some of
-the limitations of HTTP (SOAP <a href="#6">[6]</a> looks as a promising
-solution).</p>
-
-<p>Metadata will eventually require a fairly sophisticated model, much beyond
-what is currently offered by typical metadata models as the Dublin-Core system
-<a href="#1">[1]</a>. Here, RDF (Resource Description Framework)
-(<a href="#4">[4]</a>, <a href="#5">[5]</a>) looks as the right
-framework for developing the model, providing a general architectural model
-for expressing metadata and a precise syntax for the encoding and interchange
-of these metadata over the Web.</p>
-
-<p>The fact of encoding also the microscopic, logical level of mathematics opens
-the possibility to have completely formalised subsystems of the library
-(<a href="#9">[9]</a>,<a href="#10">[10]</a>), which could be checked
-automatically by standard tools for the
-automation of formal reasoning and the mechanisation of mathematics (proof
-assistants and logical frameworks
-(<a href="#15">[15]</a>,<a href="#16">[16]</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. In MOWGLI we shall use the COQ
-Proof Assistant of INRIA <a href="#13">[13]</a> as a paradigmatic example of
-these applications.</p>
-
-<p>An alternative route for the creation of content-based mathematical
-information from standard digital repositories by means of a suitable
-LaTeX-based authoring system will be explored by the Albert Einstein
-Institute. They publish the "Living Reviews in Relativity"
-<a href="#2">[2]</a>, a solely
-electronic journal on the Web, which provides refereed, regularly updated
-review articles on all areas of gravitational physics. AEI will develop a
-LaTeX-based authoring tool interfacing with MOWGLI, and serve as a showcase to
-demonstrate how content-mark-up in mathematics improves the usability and
-information depth of electronic science journals.</p>
-
-
-<h2>3. A minimal technological infrastructure</h2>
-
-<p>It is clear that the creation and maintenance of large repositories of
-content-based mathematical knowledge can only be conceived as a cooperative
-and distributed process, comprising not only the creation of documents, but
-also libraries of notational rules, metadata and management tools. The crucial
-point is to build a minimal infrastructure to start up this process, so that
-more and more tools can be added by interested parties. All these
-considerations lead to two requirements for the developments in MOWGLI:
-<ul>
- <li>Information must be accessible with few basic rules an no central
- authority (the web way).</li>
- <li>Make extensive use of standard XML technology and tools, even when it would
- be easier or more efficient just to develop an ad-hoc solution.</li>
-</ul>
-</p>
-
-<p>In this way, we put no barrier to third party development and, every time a
-standard technology or tool is improved, we can simply benefit of the new
-implementation with minimal effort.</p>
-
-<p>The MOWGLI architecture is essentially based on three components, which are
-distribution sites, standard browsers and plug-outs, and active components,
-such as XSLT processors, to elaborate the information. Distribution sites are
-simply HTTP and FTP servers, widespread throughout the world; user browsers
-are HTTP clients and run on the user host. We do not require any other
-components to run on a specific host. Active components must provide answers
-to browsers, requiring an HTTP server interface; they must also ask data to
-distribution sites, acting as HTTP clients. Hence, MOWGLI is essentially
-conceived as an HTTP pipeline.</p>
-
-<p>The module client of the distribution sites is the "getter", which maps URIs
-to URLs and hence documents, offering functionalities similar to the APT
-packet management system
-(<a href="http://www.debian.org">http://www.debian.org</a>).</p>
-
-<p>The main active component is the XSLT stylesheet manager, whose typical
-functionality is the application of a list of stylesheets (each one with the
-respective list of parameters) to a document. However, other components may be
-added in a completely modular way. This is exactly the content-based
-architectural design of future web system enabled by XML technology.</p>
-
-
-<h2>4. The contributions from the participants</h2>
-
-<p>The concrete background for the work in MOWGLI is represented by the
-activities at the participating institutions. Though details could easily be
-obtained from the MOWGLI web-page
-(<a href="http://mowgli.cs.unibo.it">http://mowgli.cs.unibo.it</a>) some short
-remarks on this background should be made here.</p>
-
-<p>The Department of Computer Science at the University of Bologna is the only
-educational institution in Italy to be affiliated to W3C. They care about the
-coordination of the project. The HELM project (Hypertextual Electronic Library
-of Mathematics,
-<a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/helm">http://www.cs.unibo.it/helm</a>, see also
-<a href="#12">[12]</a>) is active in
-Bologna since 1999. It is one of the systems of reference mentioned in the
-previous section.</p>
-
-<p>INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) is a
-French institution located in Rocquencourt. They pursue two projects of
-importance for MOWGLI: the Lemme project, introducing and developing formal
-methods for use in writing scientific computing software, and the LogiCal
-project, which developed the Coq proof assistant (see
-<a href="#13">[13]</a>).</p>
-
-<p>The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is based in
-Kaiserslautern and Saarbruecken. Its main mission is technology transfer, i.e.
-to move innovations in Artificial Intelligence from the lab to the market
-place. Its main MOWGLI-related prototypical product so far has been the
-Web-based learning environment ActiveMath that integrates several external services.</p>
-
-<p>The Subfaculteit Informatica of Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen hosts a
-broad experience in logic, formal methods and theorem proving. They are
-involved in several research activities in this domain as the EC sponsored
-Network "TYPES", the FTA project (Fundamental Theorem of Algebra), the EC
-Working group Calculemus which also deals with OpenMath et al.</p>
-
-<p>The role of the Albert Einstein Institute (MPG, Golm) near Potsdam has been
-described above already. They provide a test bed with the Living Reviews which
-will represent the important link to the domain of mathematical publishing.
-This also is the main concern of the partner TU Berlin which is formally
-associated to AEI caring about the exploitation and information dissemination
-for MOWGLI.</p>
-
-<p>Trusted Logic makes the group complete. This is a French start-up company,
-which offers a wide range of efficient and secure solutions of smart cards and
-terminals in a wide range of areas. Their development methodology includes a
-permanent concern of quality and security aspects.</p>
-
-<p>As it is common for projects like MOWGLI the cooperation between the partners
-is regulated by workpackages and a time schedule for the deliveries. But the
-project started formally in March 2002. Hence these things are still theory,
-and it will be subject of the next report on MOWGLI to describe, how theory
-came into practise.</p>
-
-
-<h2>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h2>
-
-<dl>
- <dt><a name="1"></a>[1]</dt>
- <dd>The Dublin Core Metadata Inititiative. <a href="http://purl.org/dc/">http://purl.org/dc/</a></dd>
-
- <dt><a name="2"></a>[2]</dt>
- <dd>Living Reviews in Relativity.
- <a href="http://www.livingreviews.org">http://www.livingreviews.org.</a></dd>
-
- <dt><a name="3"></a>[3]</dt>
- <dd>Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 2.0 W3C Recommendation, 21 February
-2001. <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/">http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/.</a>
- </dd>
-
- <dt><a name="4"></a>[4]</dt>
- <dd>Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification, W3C
-Recommendation 22 February 1999.
- <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222">/http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/</a></dd>
-
- <dt><a name="5"></a>[5]</dt>
- <dd>Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema Specification 1.0, W3C
- Candidate Recommendation 27 March 2000.
- <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/">http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/</a></dd>
-
- <dt><a name="6"></a>[6]</dt>
- <dd>SOAP Version 1.2 Part 0: Primer. W3C Working Draft 17 December 2001.
- <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-part0-20011217">http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-part0-20011217</a>.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="7"></a>[7]</dt>
- <dd>Extensible Markup Language (XML) Specification. Version 1.0. W3C
- Recommendation, 10 February 1998.
- <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a>
- </dd>
-
- <dt><a name="8"></a>[8]</dt>
- <dd>XSL Transformations (XSLT). Version 1.0, W3C Recommendation, 16 November
- 1999. <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt">http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt</a>.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="9"></a>[9]</dt>
- <dd>Asperti, A.; Padovani, L.; Sacerdoti Coen C.; Schena, I.: Formal
-Mathematics in MathML. Proceedings of the First International Conference on
-MathML and Math on the Web, October 20-21 2000, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="10"></a>[10]</dt>
- <dd>Asperti, A.; Padovani, L.; Sacerdoti Coen, C.; Schena, I.: Formal
-Mathematics on the Web. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on
-Libraries and Associations in the Transient World: New Technologies and New
-Forms of Cooperation, June 9-17, 2001, Sudak, Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="11"></a>[11]</dt>
- <dd>Asperti, A.; Padovani, L.; Sacerdoti Coen, C.; Schena, I.: XML,
-Stylesheets and the re-mathematization of Formal Content. Proceedings of
-Extreme Markup Languages 2001 Conference, August 12-17, 2001, Montreal, Canada.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="12"></a>[12]</dt>
- <dd>Asperti, A.; Padovani, L.; Sacerdoti Coen, C.; Schena, I.: HELM and the
-semantic Math-Web. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Theorem
-Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLS 2001), 3-6 September 2001,
-Edinburgh, Scotland.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="13"></a>[13]</dt>
- <dd>B. Barras et al.:The Coq Proof Assistant Reference Manual, version 6.3.1,
- <a href="http://pauillac.inria.fr/coq">http://pauillac.inria.fr/coq</a></dd>
-
- <dt><a name="14"></a>[14]</dt>
- <dd>Tim Berner's Lee: The Semantic Web. W3C Architecture Note, 1998. </dd>
-
- <dt><a name="15"></a>[15]</dt>
- <dd>G. Huet, G. Plotkin (eds): Logical Frameworks. Cambridge University</dd>
-Press. 1991.
-
- <dt><a name="16"></a>[16]</dt>
- <dd>G. Huet, G. Plotkin (eds): Logical Environments. Cambridge University
-Press. 1993.</dd>
-
- <dt><a name="17"></a>[17]</dt>
- <dd>Kohlase, M.: OMDoc: Towards an Internet Standard for the Administration,
-Distribution and Teaching of mathematical Knowledge. Proceedings of Artificial
-Intelligence and Symbolic Computation, Springer LNAI, 2000. </dd>
-
- <dt><a name="18"></a>[18]</dt>
- <dd>Kohlase, M.: OMDoc: An Infrastructure for OpenMath Content Dictionary
-Information. Bulletin of the ACM Special Interest Group for Algorithmic
-Mathematics SIGSAM, 2000.</dd>
-</dl>
-
-<p>
-Prof. Dr. Andrea Asperti<br />
-Dipartimento di Scienze dell Informazione<br />
-Universita degli Studii di Bologna<br />
-Via di mura Anteo Zamboni VII<br />
-I - 40127 Bologna<br />
-Italy
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Prof. Dr. Bernd Wegner<br />
-Fakultaet II, Institut fuer Mathematik<br />
-TU Berlin, Sekr. MA 8-1<br />
-Strasse des 17. Juni 135<br />
-D - 10623 Berlin<br />
-Germany
-</p>
-</body>
-</html>
projects / helm.git / blobdiff