OMDoc: an infrastructure for OpenMath content dictionary information

The OPENMATH framework for transmitting mathematical objects over the Internet relies on the concept of Content Dictionaries (CDs) to define the semantics of mathematical objects. This is an essential measure for establishing a meaningful communication amongst mathematical software systems (and humans).Currently, the infrastructure for conceiving, administering, viewing CDs is limited to a file-based almost flat repository. In this paper, we propose to use the OMDoc extension of the OPENMATH XML encoding as an infrastructure to express and manipulate content dictionary information. OMDoc extends OPENMATH by adding support for document markup (making the CDs more readable to the human user) and structured specification (making them more explicit, formal, and allow the user to reuse, and inherit CD information in a flexible, but well-defined way).