Re: Thanks and "including" mathml

On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, David Carlisle wrote:

> > Now, changing subjects a little: I am working on an xml-based
> > format for optimization problems, and would like to allow mathml objects
> > to appear in specific places in my specification. How would I do that?
> 
> Hmm, FORTRAN, Optimisation, XML, ... You don't work for NAG do you?:-)
> 

Hmm, no, not yet anyway :)

> I don't know of any Fortran specific XML tools. As one of the
> demonstrators of the recent ESPRIT Openmath project
> (http://www.nag.co.uk/projects/openmath)  we made a demonstrator taking
> polynomials and constraints displayed on a web form (using an applet
> derived from the publicly available webeq applet, displaying mathml)
> to a minimisation routine in the NAG Fortran library. The communication
> with the server running the numeric library was all in XML (using
> OpenMath rather than MathML, but it's the same thing from some
> viewpoint). The XML parsing code wasn't done in Fortran though: we used
> higher level languages that took that data and passed it in a more
> fortran friendly way to the optimisation routine, and converted the
> results back to XML for passing back to the client in the web
> form. Unfortunately the code for this is not available as it used
> several proprietary products, however the general principle certainly works.

I agree that the general principle works. But I am afraid that there has
to be a way to do this which is cheap enough to be used in academic
departments. And it needs to be fortran-accessible. My current approach
would be to convert an XML representation to a legacy representation using
XSLT. But eventually I would expect someone writing a solver to be able to
access a MathML/openmath object relatively easily, independently of the
language they are using. If there aren't people working on that, that
makes me worried.

> 
> I'm not sure what you are asking about here, how to extend your DTD so
> as to allow MathML (this is normally easy) or how to extend your tools
> to understand MathML (this may or may not be hard depending on what your
> tools do) or how to display MathML in your browser (Unless you are using
> mozilla, this requires some plugin or applet or other such extension, at
> the present time at least).
> 

Actually, I am trying to do the easy thing: To extend my DTD to understand
(some) mathml. I'll have a better idea of how easy or hard it is going to
be in my case later on tonight. I could still use some links or examples
if someone has them....

Thanks!
Leo.



========================================================================
Leonardo B. Lopes                                       leo@iems.nwu.edu 
Ph.D. Student                                              (847)491-8470
IEMS - Northwestern University              http://www.iems.nwu.edu/~leo

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2001 12:51:33 UTC