RE: Taking MathML "backwards" to go forwards

Not sure if this will help, but take a look at:

http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~hqle/

In particular:

http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~hqle/MS/MS1.html

At least it might give you some ideas.



Thomas Litant, Ph.D.
Senior INFOSEC Scientist
MITRE/Langley AFB
Comm. 1-757-825-8516
DSN 574-2525
FAX 1-757-826-9212


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-math-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-math-request@w3.org]On Behalf
> Of Paul Libbrecht
> Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 4:04 PM
> To: www-math@w3.org; CMoss@tvnz.co.nz
> Subject: Re: Taking MathML "backwards" to go forwards
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> >> [...] Our data acquisition occurs in XML, we
> >> have a template management system for our web content - so 
> what I plan 
> >> to do, is create templates in MathML to "wrap" statistical 
> analysis 
> >> equations around our election data (basically numbers of 
> votes :) and 
> >> process those equations.  [...]
> >> Does anyone know of a MathML engine which does this type of
> >> calculation already?
> >
> > Sure.  There are various options.  The obvious choices are Maple and
> > Mathematica, which both import and evaluate either presentation or
> > content MathML.
> [...]
> > What you propose sounds quite reasonable, and especially if you use 
> > content MathML
> 
> I'd be careful here to distinguish MathML presentation from content.
> As long as you stay in a relatively restricted field (really 
> restricted) 
> you have hopes to make a translation from presentation to content.
> 
> In general however, this is bound to fail. At least as soon as you 
> introduce new symbols. I am pretty sure you can easily craft a 
> presentation mathML object whose translation to content may have at 
> least two non-compatible mathematical meanings.
> 
> If WebEQ, Maple and Mathematica do these translations, they 
> do so with 
> some heuristics with which I would be very careful. Of course, if you 
> insist on presentation and the capability to input this presentation, 
> then you might want to stay with these. And you will need to test 
> permanently your equations.
> 
> If, however, your formulas are in content MathML then you're sure to 
> have it working in Maple and Mathematica.
> For the presentation of these formulas in a web-browser, however, you 
> will need some kind of stylesheets.
> 
> You would do the same job with OpenMath, for example. The latter is 
> slightly more matured than content MathML but has no official 
> presentation language. Connections to mathematical systems which can 
> receive and deliver OpenMath exist (though all alpha). See 
> for example 
> the RIACA projects' pages at
> 	http://crystal.win.tue.nl/projects/index.html
> (among others, one not too poor and OpenSource is the Gap server and 
> client for which you have a Java WebStart demo for both server and 
> client shell. For a more adventurous one, but for statistics, I think 
> they started something with R, an OpenSource statistics software).
> 
> As of presentations of formulas encoded in OpenMath within 
> straight HTML 
> (and recently to presentation MathML), a number of them are 
> available, 
> among others in the OMDoc repositories and the ActiveMath learning 
> environment.
> 	http://www.mathweb.org/omdoc/
> 	http://www.activemath.org/
> 
> Hope that helps.
> Note that I was not very clear what kind of "extraction of 
> formulas" you 
> were thinking of. Otherwise said, I did not understand the kind of 
> document containing formulas which you are planning.
> 
> Paul
>

Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 09:02:34 UTC