[Om3] Kicking off an OpenMath2+Process (Standard Enhancement)

[Michael Kohlhase]

Dear OpenMath Community,

the OpenMath workshop in Paris last year asked James Davenport and 
myself to institute a review and possibly extension process for the 
OpenMath standard to take into account the developments in web 
technologies since 2004, and the recent MathML3 Recommentation.

This e-mail is to kick off this process, restarting an earlier 
discussion in 2008, which failed to give concrete results, due to the 
involvement of key members in the MathML3 process and the unclear 
context the re-development of content MathML put the discussion.

We envision the OM2+ Process (the name was chosen in Paris to make it 
clear that it may, but need not end in an OpenMath 3 standard), to be an 
open, transparent, and public discussion process which aims at achieving 
a consensus.

To keep the discussion focused we plan to organize it in "rounds" which 
are dedicated to a particular general topic. Interested parties make  
SEPs (Standard Enhancement Proposals; written out documents that 
motivate and propose a change) and target them towards a particular 
round. SEPs are discussed via e-mail.

Rounds are say 4 weeks long and end with a documented community opinion 
on the SEPs discussed in that round (minuted by the OM2+ chairs; i.e. 
James and myself).  Other issues can be discussed in a round, but will 
not lead to a community opinion before they are formalized into a SEP. 
The OM2+ chairs try to integrate "accepted SEPs" into a draft standard 
document, which will form the basis for the discussions in the next round.

In the first round we should try to give the discussion a mandate; i.e. 
survey problems, collect SEPs and decide on the scope of the 
discussions. Other topics might include (we should discuss on the 
sequencing and additional topics in round 1.)

1. Survey of problems/extensions, errata to OM2.
2. OMOBJ (struture, encodings, equality, roles, ...)
3. Content Dictionaries/Metadata
4. Interaction with Web technologies
5. Conformance (this is something we could finally get around to this 
time).
6. conservative/pragmatic extensions (can we learn from MathML and allow 
conservative extensions).
7. "Notation"/ Content->Presentation conversion
8. ... there must be more ...

Note that the proposed 4-week schedule should give us 5 rounds before 
the OpenMath workshope (OM2011 at CICM 2011, see 
http://cicm11.cs.unibo.it/cicm11). There the chairs will make a progress 
report and hold a F2F session, where we can discuss the issues in a more 
focused manner.

We are re-using the old OM3 mailing list for the discussions (see 
http://openmath.org/mailman/listinfo/om3), though it is still open 
whether we produce OpenMath3, OpenMath2 second edition, some 
clarification notes or (though probably not desirable) nothing at all. 
The label of the package should be decided after we have decided what 
the package might be.

James Davenport & Michael Kohlhase (as the chairs of the OM2+ process)


-- 
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  Prof. Dr. Michael Kohlhase,        Office: Research 1, Room 168
  Professor of Computer Science  Campus Ring 1,
  Jacobs University Bremen           D-28759 Bremen, Germany
  tel/fax: +49 421 200-3140/-493140  skype: m.kohlhase
  m.kohlhase at jacobs-university.de http://kwarc.info/kohlhase
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