[om] MathML draft Notes available for review

[Professor James Davenport]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Bill Naylor wrote:
> So I have an honours student who has just started a project for
> implementation of some of the ideas I (together with Stephen Watt) expound
> in the paper "Meta Style Sheets for the conversion of Mathematical
> documents into multiple forms - AMAI vol 38 may 2003. A main topic is
> conversion of an extended MathML (based on OpenMath) to presentation
> MathML. If this was to include the units CDs, this could also solve this
> problem.
Excellent 
> > > I think it is important to make units precise in OpenMath, since I have
> > > heard the example of the Mars lander fiasco used quite a few times as a
> > > reason for OpenMath. If units are not made precise in OpenMath, then this
> > > sort of destroys that reason!
> > jhd:
> > I'm not sure I follow this. If OpenMath had been used, then the fiasco
> > could not have happened, since the OpenMath would specify the precise unit
> > correctly.
> 
> the point I was making was that OpenMath must specify a unit
> correctly and precisely. Currently for example, the pint is specified
> as
> 
> "This symbol represents the measure of one pint. This is the standard
> imperial measure for volume."
Right - this sort of thing certainly needs to be fixed - it's become my 
vacation project.
> This might (incorrectly) be confused with the US pint (where in fact
> there are two; liquid and dry). Also as stan was saying, these things
> seem to have a habit of changing values depending on the date. Currently
> in the units directories we say nothing about the dates of these
> quantities.
Um - good point. I'm not sure there's much we can do about this formally 
other than through CD versions, but we could certainly ad text in 
CDDescription.
James
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