In my last post I mentioned that KWARC has a lot of topics and implementation that can be of interest to e.g. support education in mathematics. Recent initiatives aim towards a Javascript framework for active documents.
Active documents are documents in a browser that provide semantic services based on the semantics inside the document (marked up in our Open Mathematical Document Format (OMDoc)). Below I am listing potential services we have in mind:
- Folding of formula e.g. (a/b)+(a/c) is reduced to … + …, when clicking on the + symbol
- Interlinking of symbols and their definitions
- Providing a guided tour to explain a given forumla. The tour provides all definitions and explanations of symbols in the formula.
- Search for the document’s formulae in the WWW (based on our MathWebSearch engine)
- Unfolding of formulae based on definition: e.g. 3! is unfolded into 1*2*3
- changing notations
- flexible elisions (see demo)
- proving mathematical statements
Our vision is to provide these services in a right-click menu for our semantic document format OMDoc. Currently, some of these services are available but have to be hard-wired in the XHTML. However, by making use of the maction-element we are now able to provide more dynamic and interactive services.
Besides the implementation of the framework, I am interested in evaluating our new service and am looking for any feedback and ideas. The questions below focus on eLearning scenario, however our service is not limited to this area but can also be applied to e.g. scientific use cases.
- Are our features helpful for mathematical education?
- What impact do we expect them to have on users?
- How can we measure this impact?
- Which additional features are need to make our service usable and intuitive for the eLearning community?
- Are these features of interest to the math education community? How can we increase their acceptance/ usage of our work?