[Om] OpenMath wiki next steps: OM3 CDs, queries, discussions

[Christoph LANGE]

Dear OpenMath developers,

  these are some new announcements about the OpenMath wiki.  First of all,
I'd like to announce that subsequent discussions about the wiki will take
place on the OpenMath 3 list, as the main task we want to accomplish with the
wiki (for now!) is the redesign of the OpenMath 3 CDs.

Now it turned out that I had the wrong CDs in the wiki because of a
misunderstanding.  The CDs that should actually be there are these ones:

https://svn.openmath.org/OpenMath3/cd/MathML

They are currently using a crude mixture of OpenMath 2, OpenMath-3-potential,
and MathML 2/3 markup, for which I need to add support to SWiM in order to be
able to first import them.  (In the further progress of OpenMath
standardisation, part of this "support" will be dropped again, of course.)

So for now the main feature besides browsing is still the discussion.  You see
that there is a lot to discuss, as e.g. Jakob put many comments from Chris
into the Trac -- and into the wiki.  You can choose either system for
discussing, and we will try to keep it synchronised.  Most of you are more
familiar with the Trac, and the Trac is more stable than my alpha research
prototype SWiM.  However, I would also like to encourage you to participate in
the wiki discussions.  The advantage of this, on the one hand, that the
discussion is clearly linked to the subject being discussed, be it a symbol or
a CD, or even, e.g., an example for a symbol.  Within the next few days I will
implement a simple e-mail notification that will keep you up to date about
ongoing discussions, and on the main page you can already see a very simple
auto-generated list of pages with ongoing discussions.

My main research motivation with the discussions is tracking their
argumentative structure, and by domain-specific extensions you will soon
benefit from that.  I believe that discussions about mathematical knowledge
items follow general patterns, and to that end I integrated a model where you
can report issues (think of Trac tickets!) with CDs/symbols/whatever, for
which others then can propose solutions (called "ideas"), and then there is
arguing and voting on these ideas, and finally a decision. Now, in special
cases, there are repetitive flows of argumentation: e.g. that one argues that
from the Description of a CDDefinition it is hard to understand what that
symbol actually is, and then somebody suggests adding an example to the
symbol.  These issue and idea types would then be available for selection in
the discussion forum.  This is easy to implement once I have seen certain
patterns.  A bit later I will also offer support for actually putting one such
idea into practice, e.g. a button "create this example that 5 users
requested".  Please see
http://kwarc.info/projects/swim/pubs/lwa08-argumentation.pdf for the
background.  (Much of it is actually implemented; it just needs to be adapted
to OpenMath.)  Please consider participating in my still-ongoing survey on
that topic at 
http://tinyurl.com/5qdetd if you have not yet done so.  I'm happy to assist
you with answering, I know that some of the forms are quite long :-/

That's it for now -- stay tuned!

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, DERI Galway/Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange



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