A number of projects involving MathML are being currently developed
at ORCCA:
Mathematical Handwriting Recognition for the Pocket PC
- This research is to study the problems of recognizing handwritten
mathematics. Recognition of individual
handwritten symbols on-line is performed on the fly this includes
recognition of the two-dimensional relationships between recognized symbols
on-line. The result of this recognition process is generation of
Presentation MathML.
-
An extended abstract and slides about this research are available.
TeX to MathML Conversion
TeX is a very powerful typesetting tool, especially when it comes to typesetting
mathematics. The huge number of TeX documents published over the past few decades
only prove TeX's popularity. However, there are certain things that cannot be
easily done with TeX documents, one of which is web publishing. Therefore, we
felt that it is important to create a tool to translate TeX mathematics into
the, increasingly popular, MathML format. Being an XML application, MathML
inherits all of XML's advantages. An added advantage of MathML is that
MathML-endoded mathematical objects can be easily exchanged between
MathML-enabled applications, while preserving semantics of those objects.
An on-line version of a TeX to MathML translator
is available. You can also find the specification for a map file,
which specifies the relationships between MathML and TeX, here.
Stylesheets and Notations for Mathematics
It is sometimes necessary to convert mathematical documents into a
number of different forms. We investigate how this may be achieved.
The project has various facets, we discuss these below:
-
Meta Stylesheets: In order to convert a document from one
form to another we may apply an XSLT stylesheet to the
document. We investigate how different stylesheets, for different
formats may be automatically generated by applying meta
stylesheets to the files which hold the notational
information. These set of files will comprise a database
of notational information.
-
Development of an XML application language. This set of tags and
attributes should be rich enough to enable the development of the
data base described in the previous point. We also intend that the
language be used for describing correspondences between TeX macros
and MathML presentation elements.
-
Development of a Notation selection tool as part of the
Maple runtime system. This tool will draw from the Meta stylesheet
technology and shall make use of the up and coming Maplets
feature of Maple 8.
This is an ongoing project, with developments continually taking
place. Further details of the project are given
here.
MathML and Aldor
It is occasionally desired to be able to communicate between a
computer algebra system and some external resource, perhaps another
computer algebra system. An effective and efficient way to do this is
to use MathML markup as an external representation for the
mathematical objects which the computer algebra system wishes to
communicate. A situation where presentation MathML might be used could
be if an object had to be sent to a web browser or
printer. A situation where content MathML could be used, is in
communication of the semantic meaning of objects between computer
algebra systems. The current project involves creating a translation
engine between the Aldor computer algebra system and both presentation
MathML and content MathML. Further details of this project, may be
found at this website.
Schema for MathML
This is work in progress.
MathML Rendering
The main goal of the project is to design and implement an
architecture for typesetting mathematics encoded in
MathML. Surprisingly enough, the
task is more challenging than one
might think at first. The same markup can be rendered in a variety of different
target media, each with different, peculiar rendering
capabilities. The user may request different particular requirements
at the same time, for example editing, quality, interactivity, etc.
A reference that we could use for this work is
GtkMathView. This
may be considered as a simplified prototype of this architecture.
