[om] A Proposal for extending OpenMath with XML annotations

[Stephane Dalmas]

Dear Mike,

> Although the question was about XML (specifically presentation MathML)
> there is, in principal, no reason why applications wouldn't want to have
> data in other formats (JPEGs for presentation, WAV for spoken rendering,
> Mathematica input syntax, ...) as attributes and currently the only way
> to do that is to encode them as a string with no indication of what the
> string contains.  For that matter, we do still have a binary encoding
> for OpenMath and an application using that might not be able to handle
> XML syntax.

In fact, the need to carry strange objects (like images or sounds or very
efficient encodings for large objects) inside OpenMath objects was recognized
long ago. And I believe it also has already been solved by OpenMath. The
strange "bytearray" basic type was introduced just for this purpose. And it
has of course a suitable mapping in the XML encoding.

> What I would propose is that we add a new basic OpenMath object (as
> described in section 3.1.1 of the standard) called e.g. Data (assuming
> that doesn't cause confusion with the OMDoc element of the same name)
> which has two fields, a type and a value.  These could only appear
> inside attributions in the position where we currently have OpenMath
> objects (which would still be valid).

I believe that what you propose can be achieved in the current standard, just
by using bytearray objects and attributing them with some type/content
indication like you did.

Of course, this may not be a really convenient solution to the problem of
using arbitrary pieces of XML inside the OpenMath XML encoding.

   Stéphane.
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