Nearly eight years after the appearance of the World Wide Web, it is still a difficult medium to use for the transmission of mathematics and scientific material in spite of its success in other areas. Sending mathematics via e-mail or reading mathematics into a software package from a web page is not a simple task, depriving the scientific community from a powerful communications tool which is the Internet. Likewise, displaying mathematics on the Internet in a way that allows editing and reuse has until now been impossible.
As the Internet continues to grow it is becoming ever more important to facilitate the exchange of mathematics amongst users and computer algebra software packages, offering automatic processing of expressions, searching, editing and reuse.
To overcome these difficulties, various companies and societies have joined together to produce standards for representing mathematics whilst preserving mathematical meaning. The World Wide Web Consortium [1] and the OpenMath society [2] have developed the two leading standards currently receiving most attention. These are MathML [3] and OpenMath [4] respectively.
The chief purpose of OpenMath is to facilitate consistent communication of mathematics between mathematical applications. MathML however, concentrates on displaying mathematics on the web whilst maintaining its meaning. Both standards are complementary and used together can provide the opportunity to expand our ability to represent, encode and successfully communicate mathematical ideas with one another across the Internet.
The primary aim of this project is to understand the differences and similarities between OpenMath and MathML, to assess their exchangeability and develop a way of mapping one standard to the other. The main objective will be to ultimately design and implement an interface running on REDUCE which will translate OpenMath into MathML and vice versa. This interface will provide REDUCE with the capability of exchanging mathematics with other applications as well as displaying output on the World Wide Web and reading from it, allowing REDUCE to join the MathML/OpenMath trend.