I fully agree that new areas of mathematics are fluid and so it is difficult to attach universally understood semantics to every expression. For OpenMath this just means that "contexts" will be locally developed and used until a particular community decides that a field is mature enough to have contexts that are in the official registry. However two consenting programs must be able to share semantic markup even if it is only locally understood. Thus I might have a browser that works with a computational backend and I still want all the good stuff like subexpression selection and line breaking, but I do not want the semantics discarded by the browser before it hands information to the backend. Even worse, I do not want the backend to discard semantic information before it gives it to the browser. This makes it difficult to carry on a high-level discussion between the two apps if the backend has to continually reanalysis information it originally gave the browser! I think people sometimes overestimate just how much semantic information is necessary. Whatever its commercial success, AXIOM has at least proved that type information can go a long way in converting a general expression into a fully analyzed one. So stating that a polynomial expression has a particular type of coefficients will significantly aid those apps that can handle a bit of semantics. BobReceived on Tuesday, 20 August 1996 16:49:26 UTC
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