[om] Newbie questions on the meaning of the Attribution Element

[Richard Fateman]

I would go even further and say that any application
is compelled to ignore the entire attribution unless
the OMObject is coming from a trusted source )or whose
attributions are certified in some way).

It is conceivable for a front-end to a computer algebra
system and a back-end to communicate with OMObjects,
in which case it is very likely that the attribution
will be the ONLY thing used  (e.g. for Maple, it could
be Maple encodings).  That is, the rest
of the OM is treated as noise, since it cannot convey anything
MORE informative than the Maple command.

In almost any other circumstance the attribution must
be treated as noise.  Just because someone includes a
Maple expression string in the attribution doesn't mean
it is accurate; and if it is not Maple that is
receiving the object, what sense will be made of it? One
can only make sense of it if one has a "fake Maple"
parser and knowledge base.

In fact this illustrates the fundamental flaw in OM.  In
almost any application you might as well be communicating
in some side-channel if you want to make sure something
is understood exactly and completely.  The alternative
of building up a CD etc etc is too painful.  Demonstrations
that this encoding might be useful for typesetting
(like presentation MathML) is not a proof of concept.
It is a proof that OM can be used for typesetting.

RJF



Manfred Riem wrote:
> Well,
> 
> No, an application is free to disregards the entire attribution
> depending on its need. The OMObject needs to be a valid object
> after stripping the attribution. In your example this means
> that you would strip the attribution and reattach the new LaTeX
> encoding after evaluation.
> 
> And yes if you would try to evaluate subparts of the OpenMath
> object you would end up with an attribution you wouldn't want
> to be attached to the result of the evaluation.
> 
> Grtz,
> Manfred Riem.
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-om at openmath.org [mailto:owner-om at openmath.org] On Behalf Of
> Cem Karan
> Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 3:04 PM
> To: om at openmath.org
> Subject: Re: [om] Newbie questions on the meaning of the Attribution
> Element
> 
> 
> OK, so they are totally open to anything...does this mean that all 
> applications need to understand all of the attributions of an element?  
> Using your example of the LaTeX encoding, lets say that I have an 
> application that is able to output the answer to 2+5, but it doesn't 
> understand LaTeX.  The numbers and plus sign have been attributed so 
> that you can output the string '2+5'.  My application operates on the 
> 2+5 to get 7.  I'm assuming that if it then outputs 7 in the XML
> encoding using the content dictionary that provided the encodings for 
> the other numbers, it will automatically output the correct attribution 
> as well.  I'm asking this because there might be a way (no, I can't 
> think of one off of the top of my head) to create an attribute that is 
> 'out of sync' with their corresponding elements.  If there isn't, then 
> I can break my code into much smaller portions, having each portion 
> operate only on the part of the OM object that it understands, rather 
> than having to understand everything at once.
> 
> Thanks,
> Cem Karan
> 
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