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OpenMath

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OpenMath is the name of a document markup language for mathematical formulae. Among other things, it can be used to complement MathML, a standard which mainly focuses on the presentation of formulae, with information about their semantic meaning. OpenMath can be encoded in XML or in a binary format.

Coverage

OpenMath consists of the definition of "OpenMath Objects", an abstract datatype for describing the logical structure of a mathematical formula, and the definition of "OpenMath Content Dictionaries", or collections of names for mathematical concepts. The names available from the latter type of collections are specifically intended for use in extending MathML, and conversely, a basic set of such "Content Dictionaries" has been designed to be compatible with the small set of mathematical concepts defined in Content MathML, the non-presentational subset of MathML.

History

OpenMath has been developed in a long series of workshops and (mostly European) research projects that began in 1993 and continues through today. There has been a considerable overlap throughout between the developers of Content MathML and OpenMath.

Extended Content Dictionaries with OMDoc

OpenMath content dictionaries contain definitions of symbols, which can be used in OpenMath objects, but larger structures of mathematical structure cannot be communicated using OpenMath. The OMDoc format extends OpenMath by a “statement level” (including structures like definitions, theorems, proofs and examples, as well as means for interrelating them) and a “theory level”, where a theory is a collection of several contextually related statements. OMDoc's theories are designed to be compatible to OpenMath content dictionaries, but they can also be set into inheritance and import relations.

See also