The OpenMath Project "is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under the Esprit Multimedia Standards Initiative (project No. 24.969), commencing September 1997. It is part of a wider community which has been working in this area since 1993." With activities coordinated by the OpenMath Society, "OpenMath is an emerging standard for communicating semantically-rich representations of mathematical objects between all kinds of computer programs. The communication can take place between software packages and on the WorldWide Web. The associated tools, which will be developed as part of the project, will permit the display, manipulation and access of mathematical information stored electronically."
"OpenMath is highly relevant for heavy industry, working with large engineering type databases (e.g., aerospace, car manufacturing) as well as technical and mathematical publishing. OpenMath intends to provide standards for mechanisms which permit the interactive manipulation of mathematical objects inside a web browser. Envisaged results of the OpenMath activities are: (1) The OpenMath Standard: a mechanism for representing mathematical objects and describing their semantic content; (2) a mechanism for introducing new content and user-extension of the standard; (2) A range of Content Dictionaries: accepted collections of definitions of mathematical concepts; (4) Tools for manipulating OpenMath objects and Content Dictionaries; (5) A range of applications and plug-ins which use OpenMath in several areas."
Note that the OpenMath Standard has a specification for XML encoding as well as for binary encoding. "This encoding has been designed with two main goals in mind: (1) to provide an encoding that uses the most common character set (so that it can be easily included in most documents and transport protocols) and that is both readable and writable by a human. (2) to provide an encoding that can be included (embedded) in XML documents. This encoding is rather simple and straightforward (except, maybe, for character strings)."
References:
OpenMath Society - "The Society brings together tool builders, software suppliers, publishers and authors."
OpenMath Resources from The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd. (NAG)
See also: "EUROMATH Project" and "Mathematical Markup Language (XML)." More broadly: "SGML/XML and Math."
[May 20, 1999] David Carlisle (NAG) announced the availability of a revised set of XML/XSLT/HTML files from the OpenMath Project. The documents will be interest to anyone tracking the 'semantic markup of mathematics' but they are more broadly relevant as examples of XSLT. The new materials include XML source files, XSLT transformations to an alternative XML formats, and XSLT transformations to HTML. Carlisle says: "As the input files, the XSLT, and the output are all available it might prove useful as some working examples using the current draft of XSL. James Clark's XT implementation was used, but the stylesheets should run with any conforming XSL system as no extensions have been used."
See: "OMDoc: A Standard for Mathematical Documents." The OMDoc format is an extension of OpenMath standard.
