[om] about translating back and forth and data loss

[Gifford Cheung]

Hi,
I'm a student at Berkeley, and I'm trying to pin down some details about 
OpenMath
for research, if you could answer some questions about OpenMath for me, I'd 
be
very grateful...
One of the issues of evaluating a math representation language, especially 
if it is intended
to work between or among different CAS, is whether the breadth of the 
description will lose
information over multiple translations.
OpenMath seems to have many different domains in the use of content 
dictionaries. Apparently
there is a native OpenMath CD as well as one for MathML, and others are 
expected: Mathematica
and Maple, for example. Is this correct?
How do you expect people to use the native OpenMath Content Dictionary in 
conjunction with, say, the Mathmatical Content Dictionary? Is it possible to 
convert from Mathematica's internal
representation of math to a OpenMath Mathematica Content Dictionary based 
representation
without losing data (i.e. floating point numbers, degrees of accuracy, 
notation, etc...)
If yes, would there be any native OpenMath appearing in the conversion?
It seems like the best way to convert from Mathematica to Maple would be to 
skip OpenMath
altogether... why OpenMath?
Thanks for your time, your reponse would be much appreciated,

Gifford Cheung



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