Some OpenMath History
MathML and OpenMath have always had a shared history and more or
less documented ways of converting between them. Conceptually the
conversion is very simple and OpenMath symbol
abc could be expressed as the Content MathML symbol
<csymbol>abc</csymbol>. Successive versions of
MathML have in fact added features that made this conversion simpler
and better information preserving. MathML2 added csymbol which
is a better fit for OpenMath symbols than ci. In MathML1 and
MathML2 further information about the OpenMath Symbol would have to be
packaged into the definitionURL attribute. In MathML3 we added explicit
support for recording Content Dictionaries by adding a cd attribute to
csymbol.
Although the basic idea of the transformation was simple, the
details of the transformation were complicated by a desire to map to
the pre-defined MathML elements where available. So <OMS
name="sin" cd="trans1"/> should map to the MathML element
<sin/> rather than
<csymbol>sin</csymbol>.
The relationship between the predefined MathML Content MathML forms
and the simpler, more regular, but much more verbose, OpenMath syntax
was not formally specified by MathML so had to be specified as part of
the transformation to OpenMath. An early version of such a
transformation description is this 10 year old document still
available from the OpenMath site.
Conversion
between MathML and OpenMath.
Around the same time, the conversions were implemented in XSLT. The
original versions predated XSLT 1, although the versions currently
available from the OpenMath site use XSLT 2. Converting from OpenMath
to MathML:
om2cmml
and from MathML to OpenMath:
cmml2om.
MathML3 Strict Content MathML
The relationship between
<sin/> and
<csymbol>sin</csymbol>
may rightfully be seen as a purely MathML issue and not something that
should be a by-product of converting to the OpenMath form
<OMS name="sin"/> and so MathML3 introduced, for each
of its Content layout forms, an explicit rewrite rule
expressing the construct in Strict Content MathML which is a
restricted form just using csymbol.
Section 4.6 of Chapter 4 of the MathML 3 spec specifies an explicit
multi-pass algorithm applying these rewrite rules to convert any valid
Content MathML expression into an expression just using the restricted
Strict Content MathML vocabulary.
4.6 The
Strict Content MathML Transformation.
Conceptually a conversion to Strict Content MathML could be made
which first converted to OpenMath, then converted back to MathML using
a stylesheet that removed all the special case rules originally added
to om2cmml
and documented in the OpenMath report referenced above. This was in
fact implemented and is how the majority of the Strict Content MathML
examples in Chapter 4 of the MathML spec were constructed. However
there were some choices to be made in the mapping specification and in
some cases the old OpenMath stylesheets made different choices. Where
feasible I updated the stylesheets to match, but one essential
structural difference remained. cmml2om implements a typical XSLT
depth first walk over the input document, applying whichever template
matches at that point. However the working group felt that the
exposition of the algorithm was clearer if it was expressed as a
multi-pass algorithm where each rule is applied in order over the whole
tree, with the result being passed on to the next stage, to be
rewritten by the next rewrite rule. These two approaches usually
produce the same result, but in edge cases where the order of
transformations matter they produce results that are (baring bugs)
mathematically equivalent, but are structurally different.
As a requirement for MathML3 to proceed to W3C Recommendation
status, we needed to show that the algorithm in Section
4.6
was implementable and did the right thing. It was clear that while my
conversion via OpenMath was fairly reasonable it wasn't implementing
the algorithm as specified and didn't produce the specified results in
all cases.
C2S Implementation
Fortunately Robert Miner (co-chair of the Math WG) stepped up and
offered to implement the algorithm as specified. It was good that he
did, as inevitably, implementation experience showed some gaps or
inconsistencies in the first drafts of the algorithm, and the final
published form is much improved as a result of this
implementation.
The initial home of the new stylesheet was in the W3C member area
of the W3C CVS repository. Recently Robert suggested that we make it
public, and asked if I'd host it at my google code
web-xslt
project site, since it is there and hosts other MathML related XSLT
stylesheets.
So Robert's implementation is now available (under W3C or MIT
licen[cs]e) from
google code: c2s.
Comments on the stylesheet are probably best addressed to the www-math mailing list, but comments
may also be dropped here on this blog or on the google code wiki pages.
