[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)
What will be the consequences when efforts like these will be transplanted to other sectors like Medicine? E.g. HL7-SGML http://www.mcis.duke.edu/standards/HL7/committees/sgml/ Greetings Gerard Freriks, MD << start of forwarded material >> Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 11:44:05 GMT From: Peter@u... (Peter Murray-Rust) To: xml-dev@i... Cc: clic@i..., chemime@i..., ion@m... Subject: Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Lines: 89 Sender: owner-xml-dev@i... Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Peter@u... (Peter Murray-Rust) [To xml-dev, crossposted to CLIC and CHEMIME and Patrick Ion, AMS. Patrick, please feel free to circulate this to HTML-Math-WG. This posting is being addressed to both XML-DEV and the Chemical Informatics community, so please excuse any confusions :-).] The first draft of MathML was published on May 15th and is enormously exciting. It is written to be compatible with XML and to evolve as that spec evolves, so that we have one of the very first DTDs that has been developed in that way. Since math is common to a very large number of vertical markets in the ScientificTechnicalMedical market (and many others) MathML will highlight how domain-specific DTDs and documents can be re-used in a variety of contexts. The draft (long, impressive, and in several sections) is at: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-math/ <GENTLE_REQUEST> Could the authors provide a tar.gz or similar file so that all the sections including the gifs can be downloaded? Also could the appendices have names unique under 8.3 format. TIA :-) </> Note that the Math-WG has addressed the two key aspects of encoding maths - presentation (cf. TeX) and content (cf. symbolic algebra, plotting packages, etc.). The current document addresses both of these and having had very useful discussions with Patrick Ion, Martin and Roy Pike and Steve Buswell I'm very confident that MathML will cater for a wide range of chemical requirements. Certainly I hope to explore its use for plotting graphs, extracting functions, using symbolic variables within chemical discourse and tables, and much more. In principle it should be possible to (say) extract a set of force-field equations from a molecular mechanics paper and directly manipulate them into a computer program. The publication of MathML coincides with the XML-ERB's request for discussion on multiple namespaces, and the very large emphasis at SGML97 on Information Objects. The XML community is now clearly working as fast as possible to develop the spec so that an XML document can be composed of a variety of fragments/subdocuments/objects - various names are chosen. Chemical Markup Language is being developed along some of the same lines as MathML - to be XML-compatible, to use common semantics where appropriate, and to avoid namespace collisions. Whatever syntactic mechanism is chosen it will allow subcomponents of a document to be linked to the appropriate DTD - very probably distributed over the WWW - and for appropriate semantics and behaviour to be applied. The math proposal has enormous implications for technical publications and documents. In CML a space has been deliberately left called 'MATH' and now can be replaced by 'MathML', e.g. as: <!Entity % mathml.dtd SYSTEM "http://www.w3.org/where/ever/mathml.dtd"> %mathml.dtd; <!Element CML (lots|of|elements|%mol)*> <!-- note NOT math --> <!Element XLIST ANY> <!-- CML's generic container --> and in a document instance something like: <P>The <A HREF="#fn1" XML-LINK="simple" ACTUATE="AUTO" SHOW="EMBED"> function</A> relating...</P> ... <XLIST TITLE="Equations in the text"> <EXPR ID="fn1" TITLE="quadratic"><MI>x</MI><POWER/><MN>2</MN></EXPR> </XLIST> would now insert the expression x^2 at the appropropriate part of the text. Note that this use of XML-LINK avoids the complexity of tailoring the parent DTD to accommodate infinitely variable content models. Note that the document suggested above *can be validated* if required, since all the DTDs involved are included. Of course this is only possible because CML and Math have no namespace collisions, and this mechanism will not be generally applicable. (MathML has some very short GIs (have I got the terminology right this time? :-) and is therefore likely to collide with an arbitrarily chosen DTD). I'd welcome comments from the chemical community on this and suggest that posting them to chemime@i... would be the most appropriate (please *don't* post directly to the math group!). On the more general question of interoperability of information objects we may need to wait a week or two to see how the XML-WG discussions take that, but I'm very keen to start trying to get an implementation of math in CML. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection Virtual School of Molecular Sciences http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...) << end of forwarded material >> Gerard Freriks,huisarts, MD C. Sterrenburgstr 54 3151JG Hoek van Holland the Netherlands Telephone: (+31) (0)174-384296/ Fax: -386249 Mobile : (+31) (0)6-54792800 ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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