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+ <title>Contribution to policies of the European Community</title>
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <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 / commitdiff