RE: Whither MathML support?

Daniel, it seems to me that the precursor question is: is it possible to semantically represent mathematics in a single general declarative data format? Whether that data format could reasonably be XML, JSON, or something else seems a second-order question as it would be moot if the answer to the first question is "no".

I would think of systems like Mathematica as embodying possible existence proofs but yet it seems that it is both leaning on programmatic scripting and (per threads like https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/28162/alternatives-to-mathematica) not able to handle all the various disciplines that comprise "mathematics" (not to mention the various other fields that use applied mathematics).

In any case this seems like a knowledge representation question more so than a publishing question. E.g if it was possible to represent mathematics semantically it would be fodder for AI first and foremost, and only secondarily fodder for presentational publishing.

So I think that this group should probably punt on this problem as both being beyond its scope and likely insoluble.

--Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Bennett [mailto:daniel@citizencontact.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 7, 2017 11:19 AM
To: public-publishingbg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Whither MathML support?

Hoping that someone will answer the questions I posed. This was non-responsive to my questions.

Thanks,

Daniel


On 9/7/2017 2:03 PM, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-09-07 at 13:56 -0400, Daniel Bennett wrote:
> [...]
>> The second question, and as a strong supporter of XML, is it possible 
>> to semantically represent math with XML? For example, there is no 
>> real way to have page and line numbers in XML as well as paragraphs 
>> that span them, as this breaks nestedness.
> The usual approach involves thinking of page breaks as separations 
> rather than containers and then using empty XML elements to represent 
> them; the same for line divisions (except for poetry, where the lines 
> are part of the content).
>
> For rhetorical overlap with structure, such as a quotation that goes 
> from the middle of one paragraph to the middle of the next, a 
> representation of one structure or the other as primary and using 
> attributes to link together e.g. a continued quotation, is a common 
> approach.
>
> The people at the Text Encoding Initiative and more generally Digital 
> Humanities have been doing these things for decades, so it's a 
> question of knowing where to look ;-) There've been papers on 
> representing overlap in XML presented at Extreme Markup and, later, 
> Balisage, conferences.
>
> Best,
>
> Liam
>

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2017 18:58:14 UTC