Re: MathML Presentation to content transformation

Neil Soiffer wrote:
> 
> While I agree that this is needed for 100% certainty, you wouldn't
> do that if you were reading a paper containing it.  If the software doing
> the conversion has information about the context (eg, by user control or
> metadata extraction), it can make these transformation with very high
> reliablility.  There is an important point about notation:  it is meant
> to imply underlying functionality.  If it is ambigious within its context,
> it is probably confusing to readers and will eventually die a timely death.

Waw, I wish I could be so optimistic...

As others state the "conversion", does, I believe need some intelligence 
and, not the least, some "contextualization".

Aside of the computer-algebra systems (Maple, Mathematica, soon MuPad, 
GAP, Yacas) which generate MathML-content at least from within their 
human-readable syntax, I would note two more things (not really 
inputting MathML-presentation):
-> the QMath processor (start at http://www.matracas.org/) is a tool 
which accepts a textual syntax closer to that of these 
computer-algebra-systems and creates OpenMath out of it (which then not 
too hard to convert into MathML-content). QMath is extensible and can, 
with some work (the contextualization), be used to convert formulae in a 
TeX source into formulae in OpenMath
-> the efforts of the team of Stephen Watt at ORCCA (Londong, Ontario) 
which have a LaTeX to MathML trying to convert most possible LaTeX into 
some semantic encoding (which gets enriched as it goes), producing the 
conversion-stylesheets to MathML-presentation as well

And I think and wish I had forgotten others.

Paul

Received on Monday, 5 May 2003 17:28:43 UTC