Taking MathML "backwards" to go forwards

Hi All,

I'm faced with an interesting problem at work:

New Zealand's general election is happening towards the end of this year, my department is working to produce a Television/Web/Teletext (Teletext being a mostly European phenomenon )  output system for ongoing election coverage.  Our data acquisition occurs in XML, we have a template management system for our web content - so what I plan to do, is create templates in MathML to "wrap" statistical analysis equations around our election data (basically numbers of votes :) and process those equations.  The beauty of this, is in the "massaging" of the analysis equations that could follow - given the whole thing can be manipulated just as easily as any other XML node-set.

That being said, my problem is the nature of MathML as a presentation language.  I initially presumed that someone would have developed software to parse a MathML document and process the equations (silly assumption I know :)  I then happened upon JEP (http://jep.sourceforge.net) a brilliant little tool.  My concept is thus:

An XSLT document is created which simply translates a MathML document back into its pure unrendered equation form, and then feeds that equation into JEP.  

My questions are:

Has anyone already created such an XSLT translation?
Does anyone know of a MathML engine which does this type of calculation already?
Could this be viewed as going against the concept of MathML?
Am I crazy?

The last question is obviously not quite as important as the first three :)  

Regards,

Corin

Corin Moss
Lead Developer
TVNZ - Online and Digital
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Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2002 01:01:33 UTC