Re: [math-on-web] CG meeting minutes, 2018/03/30 and 2018/03/15

Thanks, Moritz, for the great discussion and for the fascinating work
you've been doing. Great paper, and really interesting idea to decorate
parsed expressions with wikidata info. Also, the Gold Standard data set
you've produced is wonderful.

Incidentally, the Riemann Hypothesis example you mention in your paper
(\zeta (s)=0\Rightarrow \Re  s=\frac12\lor \Im  s=0) does get parsed
correctly in MathLive to MASTON:

{"lhs":{"lhs":{"fn":"Zeta","arg":"s"},"op":"=","rhs":0},"op":"=>","rhs":{
   "lhs":{"lhs":{"fn":"Re","arg":"s"},"op":"=","rhs":{"num":"1/2"}},
 "op":"or",    "rhs":{"lhs":{"fn":"Im","arg":"s"},"op":"=","rhs":0}}}


It would be even better if it was decorated with Wikidata :) and there are
many expressions in the dataset that would not be parsed currently: the
transformation from a presentation representation to MASTON is a work in
progress and your dataset will be immensely useful to achieve a better
quality.

Incidentally, this expression would not parse correctly by following the
operator priority rules specified in
https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/appendixc.html since according to this, the
priority of '=' is 260 and '⇒' is 270.

Best,
Arno.


On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 6:07 PM, Peter Krautzberger <peter@krautzource.com>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Today's minutes as well as the previous (which had been very short so I
> forgot to post them -- sorry).
>
> The next meeting is April 12, noon (Eastern).
>
> Best,
> Peter.
>
>
> # MathOnWeb CG 2018-03-30
>
> * Present: Moritz, Arno, John
> * Regrets: Volker, Dani
>
> * Arno: finding a serializable representation
>   * did it because I needed it, get semantics from formula to eval,
> process etc
>   * looked around for standard representation
>   * not so much visual representation (have others)
>   * thus the post
> * Neil: capturing semantic information in a tree (or else) is a great topic
>   * serialization is not important, comes later
>   * I'd like to focus on the contents of the tree
> * Arno: I agree content is kind but form matters
>   * if you need to work on tree that requires a bunch of libs to process,
> that does not make it easy
>   * something that serializes in a standard way would make it easier for
> libraries, to improve exchange between libraries
> * Neil: great goal but we haven't really achieved it
>   * openmath kind of does that but isn't really usable (outside research
> into the format)
>   * Arno: agreed
>   * parts of openmath community wanted CAS representations that work
> across systems
>     * didn't work because e.g., mathematica and maple disagree on
> implementation
> * Arno: today they exchange on the presentation layer
>   * e.g., Mathematica and Maple exchange TeX/MathML etc
>   * seems like we can do better
>   * Neil: true but you can't capture everything
>   * Arno: exactly. But if we can exchange something that's better than
> nothing
> * Neil: they can do something using MathML etc
>   * ContentMML and openmath are not rich enough
>   * I think you'll have to be careful how you map things out
>   * how far do you want to go
>   * e.g., once you get to branch cuts, systems do it differently and
> things fall apart
>   * Arno: falling apart seems extreme point of view
> * Neil: some cut off point may be possible (e.g., high school)
>   * but people don't seem ready to write
> * Arno: in a symbolic system, they want to enter the information
>   * but if not, then not.
>   * we have a bunch of systems that do things differently, different
> heuristics etc
>   * those systems are multiplying, they are using their output but not
> sharing them at all
> * Arno: e.g., my post mentioned MathJS
>   * converting to their structure worked ok
>   * but most people use a string input, then MathJS does its own parser,
> assumptions about invisible times etc, then computation
>   * so MathJS has to do that work, every other lib does the same.
>   * users can't exchange anything, can't get consistent result
>   * but there's
> * Peter: I mostly deal with conceptual not procedural but this discussion
> reminds me of a related problem in AT
>   * heuristics go haywire a lot without a way for authors to fix them
> * Neil: heuristics are often 99%
>   * semantics would be great but people are not authoring
> * Peter: from a conceptual way, you could fix those with interest
>   * paving cow paths to improve heuristics would be reasonalbe there
>   * not sure about how procedural info could be used that
> * Arno: in TeX you have macros etc
>   * those are similar and could be leverage
> * Peter: I had a discussion about components at a workshop last week
>   * remembering many conversations about templating in (MathML) editors,
> publishers struggling
>   * the web has this of course, not just web components but just regular
> components
> * Moritz: exposing and transferring extra information is hard
>   * example from work with grad students
>   * leveragin external information is important
>   * this example gets you to wikidata
>   * linked data can then take you further
>   * however you're using and storing data, use a common dictionary
>   * wikidata is a good dictionary, good to use, link and modify
>   * http://vmext.wmflabs.org/ASTRenderer
> * Moritz: we also analyzed  MathML convertors that can capture semantics
>   * few that could (somehow) describe content mathml
>   * analyzed them further
>   * this project will continue for a few years (since it's Phd projects)
>   * accepted paper: https://www.overleaf.com/13063311bcsyrtvqrdry#/
> 50123989/
>   * Arno: this looks very interesting
> * Peter: linked data should be a major consideration in any of this, also
> for subject/content metadata
> * Arno: I had only found a few dictionaries
>   * open math, proof wiki
>     * not sure how related
>     * Moritz: not sure; they don't seem connected to any wikibase
> * Moritz: the good thing about wikidata is that there are actually users
>   * this was rather nice compared to other math projects which usually
> have few participants and then the lead left and it died
>   * wikidata has thousands of contirubto
>   * Peter: background on terms?
>   * Moritz: wikidata is displayed via a MediaWiki instance
>     * but wikibase is the data repository that drives wikidata (as a data
> platform)
> * Peter: random question: are SI units represented?
>   * Moritz: yes but it's complicated
>     * e.g., https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11379 for energy
>     * has quality allows you to go past has attribute (which requires
> community vote, you'll have to model that on your end)
>     * with has quality, you can refer to an item which you can add to
> wikidata yourself (anything you can model in a triple store)
> * Peter: just a quick word on the workshop since we're out of time
>   * https://aimath.org/workshops/upcoming/webmath/
>   * many of the CG will be there
>   * AT vendors, a11y experts, publishers, actual mathematicians etc
>   * should give us a lot of input for future work
>
>
> # MathOnWeb 2018-03-15
>
> Present: Arno, Peter
> Regrets: Neil, Dani, Volker
>
> * Arno: working on abstract syntax tree for mathlive
>     * data structure to be parsed and computed on
>   * open question as to in how far I could infer semantics from LaTeX
>   * putting together a spec, hoping for feeback
>   * that might be something interesting for interop
> * Peter: mathquill etc were interested early on
>   * Arno: Kevin had reached out but was skeptical due to the
> expressiveness of LaTeX
>     * I'll post a link to the spec after the meeting
> * Peter: related: heuristics of AT are a mess
>   * I wouldn't even mind if we agreed to them
>   * but that would break a lot of existing content
> * Arno: different fields have different customs, too
>   * Peter: agreed. It seems more likely to handle this via enrichment into
> some broader semantic framework
> * Peter: I was recently looking at MathJax's PreviewHTML output again
>   * it's really quite nice from a pure-CSS perspective
>   * and so easy to tweak the output
> * Arno: I was surprised how much font-independence I got in mathlive
>   * many element styles are constants (e.g., variable margin)
>   * http://mathlive.io/?debug=on shows some of the output
>
>