RE: Digital Mathematics Textbooks

Math Working Group,

Greetings.  In the RDFa Working Group, I broached some topics pertinent to digital mathematics textbooks (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/2012Dec/0009.html).

"I would like to broach for discussion RDFa and some hypertext document scenarios including RDF collections, Containers And Collections (http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/wiki/ContainersAndCollections) and time-based multimedia documents or documents with time-based multimedia components, with RDF semantics. Some topics are discussed at Introducing Time into RDF (http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~willig4/temp/time.pdf) and other topics include SMIL-based container and collection semantics.

"Are the ideas discussed in Containers and Collections post-conceptual or in a phase towards specification, for example in HTML + RDFa 1.1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-in-html/)?

"Argumentation and RDFa is an interesting topic (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-argumentation/2012Dec/0000.html) and an example usage scenario, with regard to the topics under discussion, is that of digital mathematics textbooks utilizing RDFa for the semantics of mathematical proofs in hypertext-based documents which explain mathematical proofs didactically. Towards complex document structure topics, some mathematical concepts might have multiple mathematical proofs and some mathematical proofs or mathematical proof portions might have multiple discussions, for example for different learning styles. Navigation can be facilitated by techniques including tab-based ergonomics or multitouch. The mathematical proofs' semantics can be represented in such hypertext-based document scenarios utilizing, perhaps, RDF containers and collections.

"Additionally, time-based multimedia documents and documents with time-based multimedia components are interesting topics with regard to hypertext-based documents, digital books and textbooks, and RDFa (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Dec/0118.html), for example infographics."



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski