IAMC

Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation

• Background
• IAMC Efforts and Systems
• IAMC Workshops
• IAMC Framework Project at ICM
• WME: Web-based Mathematics Education
• Activities
• SymbolicNet
• Live Demos

Background

The Internet and the World-Wide Web make many kinds of information and services easily accessible. An article on IEEE spectrum discusses Math on the Internet. The importance of making technical/mathematical communication available on the Internet is underscored by the recent activities at the W3 Consortium and elsewhere to make publishing mathematical materials on the Web easy. MathML is an XML application for markup of mathematical expressions. Both presentation (display layout) and content (computation semantics) markup are supported. Browsers Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox support MathML display when the math fonts needed are installed.

NetSolve, a joint project between the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, makes scientific computation packages, mostly numerical in nature, available to users through a variety of interfaces and to Web users through a Java Applet. NetSolve agents register computation resources and refer clients to them based on capabilities of the resources, computational efficiency and fault tolerance considerations. The NetSolve version 1.2 includes Matlab, Mathematica and C client interfaces and an agent.

The IBM digital publishing group has released the experimental Techexplorer, a Web browser plug-in that dynamically formats and displays documents containing scientific and mathematical expressions coded in TeX/LaTeX or MathML. WebEQ from Design Science, Inc. is a suite of Java programs for creating and displaying Web documents containing mathematical formulas. WebEQ 2.3 offers a free math viewer for widely used browsers. MathPlayer also from Design Sciences, Inc. is a MathML plug-in for Internet Explorer. MathZilla support for MathML from Mozilla and Netscape. EzMath is a visual editor that helps convert widely used mathematical notations to markup codes, in either EzMath or MathML, ready for inclusion in Web pages. The W3 Consortium's Amaya Web browser demonstrates a prototype implementation of MathML which allows users to browse and edit Web pages containing complex mathematical expressions. Together with the rest of the Web page, these expressions are manipulated through a WYSIWYG interface.

In addition to viewing mathematical formulas on a Web page, progress is being made to make mathematical computing also easily accessible on the Internet. The mathematical results obtained from one computation service ought to be usable by another. Accessing a math-oriented computing service should be as simple as entering a command, retrieving a Web page, or sending email. Internet accessibility can make research, experimental, parallel/super computing, one-of-a-kind, demonstration, or commercial software systems that deal with mathematics in any technical discipline easily reachable on a global basis.

What's needed is flexible integration of heterogeneous mathematical systems on a distributed basis, involving data integration, control integration, and user interface integration.

IAMC Efforts and Systems

• WebEQ and MathPlayer from Design Science, Inc. is a suite of Java programs for creating and displaying Web documents containing mathematical formulas in MathML. Design Science also has a how to author page providing info on creating Web pages with MathML content.


• UMSS: A stylesheet enabling the support of MathML in a variety of browsers at W3C--the stylesheet allows conforming XHTML+MathML documents to be rendered, without changing the document, in a range of browsers.


• A Framework for Brokering Distributed Mathematical Services, at RISC/Linz.


• MathML, a W3C recommendation for the presentation and content encoding of mathematics based on XML. MathML is becoming widely accepted as a standard for machine-to-machine communication of mathemtics and for inclusion of mathematics in Web pages.


• Displaying MathML/2.0 with the FIGUE package. FIGUE is a versatile graphics display package developed by INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France.


• MathWeb-SB, a software bus for connecting mathematical software at mathweb.org.


• ActiveMath, a Web-based learning environment for mathematics being developed mainly at the DFKI in Saarbruecken and partly at the university of Saarbruecken. (ActiveMath Demo).


• JavaMath API, a free (GPL) open source system to allow Java programs to interface to existing mathematical compute engines.


• W3C Math homepage, MathML main page, See MathML 2 Candidate Recommendation (latest).

li>Distributed IAMC system architecture and protocol

• IAMC Framework related papers and technical reports by ICM/kent.
• IAMC Framework Project at ICM/kent.
• MP is a mathematical data encoding/exchange format that uses a binary encoded annotated parse tree for efficiency.


• JavaMath, free software enabling Java-based mathematical programs to use the computational capabilities of existing compute engines. JavaMath can be used for stand-alone applications and for construction of Internet based client-server systems and Web pages.


• TILU: Table of Integrals Look Up and Computer Algebra at UC Berkeley. Among Richard Fateman's papers, of particular relevance to IAMC are Symbolic Mathematics System Evaluators, and Network Servers for Symbolic Mathematics.


• EzMath is a visual editor that helps convert widely used mathematical notations to markup codes, in either EzMath or MathML, ready for inclusion in Web pages.


• NetSolve version 1.2 makes scientific computation packages, mostly numerical in nature, available to users through a variety of interfaces and to Web users through a Java Applet.


• The W3 Consortium's Amaya Web browser demonstrates a prototype implementation of MathML.


• Techexplorer is a Web browser plugin for displaying TeX/LaTeX and MathML.


• Wolfram Research's Web Mathematica demonstrates web access to mathematical computation supported by the Mathematica system.


• OpenMath is a protocol for representing semantically rich mathematical objects, allowing them to be exchanged between programs, stored in databases, and published in electronic form. The central notions in OpenMath are Content Dictionaries, providing standard and application-defined vocabularies and definitions, and Phrasebooks, which provide translation between application concepts and those defined in the relevant Content Dictionaries. Translated data may be exchanged in either binary or XML form.

  Visit the OpenMath Content Dictionary index for a first-hand look at the OM content dictionaries.

  A draft OpenMath standard is available from the Esprit Open Math Consortium.



• jDvi, a dvi file viewer written in Java, that can place TeX documents on the web and also allow embeded Java applets in the document


• WebMath is a mailing list for people interested in mathematics, distance learning, on-line journals, etc. on the Web. Here is how to sign up.

Workshops

• IAMC 2004 Workshop Thursday 8 July 2004, University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain. IAMC 2004 homepage
• IAMC 2003 Workshop Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation Workshop and Proceedings,
  Thursday 7 August 2003, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA USA
• IAMC 2002 Workshop Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation Workshop,
  July 7, 2002, at ISSAC'2002, 7 July 2002, Lille, France
• IAMC 2001 Workshop
  Proceedings of the IAMC'2001 Workshop on Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation, July 21, 2001, at ISSAC'2001, University of Western Ontario, Western Ontario Canada.
• Mathematical Knowledge Management: MKM'2001
  Electronic Proceedings of the First International Workshop
• IAMC 1999 Workshop
  Proceedings of one-day workshop on Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation at ISSAC'99 (International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation), an ACM SIGSAM/SIGNUM Symposium held July 28--31, 1999 at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. Canada.

• Third International Conference on Mathematical Knowledge Management. Bialowieza, Poland,19-21 September, 2004
• Workshop Mathematics on the Semantic Web , Eindhoven, The Netherlands, May 12-14, 2003
• Math on the Web: A Status Report; Focus: Adding Value for STM Publishing aa article by Robert Miner and Paul Topping, Design Science, Inc.
• MathML 2002: International Conference on MathML and Math over the Web. Chicago, Illinois. June 28-30, 2002. Here is Call For Paper.
• MathML International Conference, 20 to 21 October, 2000 in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
• Math on the Web Status Reports from Design Science.
• OpenMath Workshop, Technical University Eindhoven, 15-16 June 1999.
• The Future of Mathematical Communication: 1999 (FMC99), Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), UC Berkeley, California, USA, December 1-5, 1999, (Abstracts).

Please let us know if you have a demo you wish listed here.

• Mathematical Computation Demos from ICM
• Mathematical Computation Session demos from ICM
• MathML demos from ICM

The SymbolicNet Web site maintained by ICM is a good source of information for symbolic computation. The site offers some interesting live demos for various kinds of mathematical computations.