RE: "industry needs"

For an representative example of the kind of thinking prior to the start of
the first MathML working group look at

http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/html/htmlmath.announce

The MathML working group came out of a desire to go a bit beyond (or instead
of) that kind of approach and make embedded math formulas accessible to
computation engines, but with no real plan beyond possibly adopting one CA
vendors notation and asking browsers vendors to parse strings in a non-xml
syntax and add rendering with something of the complexity of TeX.  

As for success and wide adoption going way beyond such hopes:

1. adding over a 1000 characters added to unicode.
2. vendor work leading to mechanisms for direct inclusion and display in a
number of browsers including ie6 and mozilla.  (a major hurdle)
3. direct mathml support added to several xml editors, all major Computer
algebra and numeric systems.
4. incorporation of mathml into the production process for major math
publishers, and into electronic course delivery systems such as WebCT and
BlackBoard.
5. adoptions by math related societies and also the patent office which
alone generates over 12000 pages a month.
6. inclusion of a mathml core set of dictionaries in OpenMath.
7. Recent experimental extensions to Arabic Math without major design flaws
being encountered and strongly underscoring that there is a many to many
relationship between notations and concepts.
8. Impact on other working groups as a difficult test case for various
technologies.

The main places I am seeing dissatisfaction is from two areas.  At one end
we have those who want to type 2D^2y on their html page and have it display
like mathematics and at the other we have those who want to incorporate a
more formal approach to definitions and types.  

The former is currently only addressed by preprocessing into MathML, while
the latter is addressed by  referencing more formal structures and
associating it with a visual display.  It was a conscious design decision to
go this way.

We deliberately opted for preprocessing of strings as it directly conflicted
with the goal of archiving semantics (there is no standard meaning to such
an expression, even to the level of assuming multiplication or standard
meanings for (say) D). We ruled out the latter as existing proposals were
too experimental and increased the complexity of an already complex
proposal.  We felt there was enough in place to experiment with the concepts
and standardize later and provided examples in Notes of how a systematic use
of the existing structure could address some concerns.

----

As for the goals of the working group and their refinement, the group was
driven largely by:

	1. There could only be one MathML.
	2. We had to be able to render Math to the quality of TeX.
	3. We had to be able to archive computable expressions in a manner
which captured their computational semantics.
	4. Not everybody was interested in both 2 and 3 but both were
essential.
	5. meeting requirements 2 and 3 often led to different syntactic
structures.
	
Everyone on the working group worked to achieve those goals including making
them work together, even though many were primarily interested in only one
or the other -- and largely because of a recognition of 1.

By analogy I would argue that while RIF members may feel that they are only
interested in one formalizm there is an obligation to see if we can provide
a framework that accommodates them.
 
Stan
-----Original Message-----
From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@isr.umd.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 5:51 PM
To: Stan Devitt
Cc: 'Alex Kozlenkov'; Gerd Wagner; public-rif-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: "industry needs"

On Jun 6, 2006, at 4:29 PM, Stan Devitt wrote:

> The point here was not to debate the details and perceptions of of 
> MathML

I wasn't really trying to debate it, I was merely trying to learn from that
experience. I agree there are analogies between RIF and MathML, but I also
am trying to nail down what "widespread adoption"  
really means, esp. as a *general* CSF. But it's hard to get very far from
your elliptical remarks, hence the request for further points. I merely
included the other pointers as evidence that I did try to find this out
myself (however quickly).

> though I think it and the process that was followed does provide good 
> counter examples to some of the ideas I have been hearing.
[snip]

Not if they aren't accessible. Or rather, it's harder for them to do so. Of
course, this being the W3C, the discussions, at least, are open. But the
adoption probably comes from other sources.

I tend to think that "widespread adoption" is a bit of a empty whatever it
is (requirement?). (In fact, I had an email from someone off list where they
said they understood "widespread adoption" to mean "widespread adoption in
the 'mainstream' rules community" where the "'mainstream' rules community"
was dominated by PR rules. So, "PR rules are essential to widespread
adoption" becomes, well, a
tautology.) I tend to think it's more important to know if *members* are
going to adoption/support it. So Alex's report is much more interesting and
informative (my skepticism wrt to the 900 IT engineers notwithstanding) than
these other ones.

Forgive my skepticism, but when people appeal to certain facts, I prefer
some back up for those facts, particularly about things that are in
principle verifiable.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2006 07:42:28 UTC