[om] Re: comments on documents

[jhd at cs.bath.ac.uk]

The recent thread on OpenMath caught me while marking: here's my
summary and two cents worth. All quotes are from fateman unless
otherwise attributed.
>From fateman at cs.berkeley.edu Sat May 18 17:27:32 2002
>>   OM encoding doesn't specify presentation.
I think David Carlisle refuted this one. OpenMath allows a user to
specify presentation in any way they want from the OpenMath.
>>   MathML doesn't specify content.
Again refuted.
>> (b) MathML has a content component, which could either
>> point to some OM piece or not.
That's right, and if it does point to OpenMath, or uses the MathML-C
symbols, then it is equivalent to a piece of OpenMath, except that the
semantics of the MathML-C are weaker, so it MIGHT mean something
different.
As David Carlisle said:
>> What we said is that MathML has no way of describing the semantics of a
>> symbol.  This seems to me to be true.
This was explicitly said by Soiffer in his talk at ISSAC2001.
Fateman said
>> That is, MathML content, if it is given,
>> is an abbreviation for a subset of OM. period.
Only if it OM-content, as above. When NIST publishes its Digital
Library of Mathematical Functions, it would be reasonable to write
(my assumptions as to what URLs would be vaild in DLMF)
<csymbol definitionURL="http://dlmf.nist.gov/9.1.1"> Gamma </csymbol>
  
Apropos of presentation, Fateman says to Carlisle:
>> Your heuristics might not be the same as mine or those in documents
>> I have been manipulating which use both  invisible space and \cdot
>> for multiplication, but with different precedence.
And this is precisely the point. OpenMath specifies no such heuristics.

James Davenport
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