We are currntly working at an aligned OpenMath/cMathML model for mathematical objects, based on the model for OpenMath objects. This will go into the MathmL3 and OpenMath3 specifications due in spring. Afterwards we will not be able to change much for a long time I expect, so we better get this one right.
There has been some discussion abouth the OpenMath referencing triplet: a symbol (OMS in OM) has three attributes a name, a cd, and a cdbase, e.g. the symbol for addition might be
<OMS cdbase="http://openmath.org/cds" cd="arith1" name="plus"/>
The cdbase and cd attributes determines a content dictionary (in this case the file http://openmath.org/cds/arith1.ocd) and the name attribute a symbol declaration in it (the name of that must be cd-unique).
In MathML3 we want to follow the same general model, but have the definitionURL attribute for specifying meaning. Here we would use the URL http://openmath.org/cds/arith1#plus currently. There was some discussion whether we should have one big CD for MathML or many small ones, … Sam Dooley remarked that if we were to use the OM triplet, then he would like to treat the cd attribute like a cdbase now, which inherits…, then we could write <apply cd="mathml">...<csymbol name="plus"/> ...</apply> (especially if we had one big CD for all MathML, then we could make the cd=”mathml” a default on the <math> element…). Frankly I find this quite attractive (after having thought about it).
I would like to take this idea a little further in MathML3: like MathML2 we use a single URI-type attribute for symbol referencing, let’s call it pref (path ref; just to distinguish it from definitionURL for this post, it could in the end becomd definitionURL to keep backwards compatibility; after all MathML does not say what kind of URLs definitionURL should be; convenient).
So we use pref attributes on csymbols, and take xml:base into the picture we can write
<csymbol pref="http://openmath.org/cds/arith1/plus"/>
<math xml:base="http://openmath.org/cds/">.... <csymbol pref="arith1/plus"/>...</math>
and even
<math xml:base="http://openmath.org/cds/">
<apply xml:base="arith1">
<csymbol pref="plus"/>...</math>
</apply>
</math>
This would make a very simple framework. All the URIs can be used for REST-ful access to the relevant features (symbol declarations in the CDs), and relative URIs work as expected. And if we write content dictionaries in a somewhat atomic way, then we can even supply them on a static web server. It would be quite simple to configure apache that it really generates the right files, for instance, in the directory …/arith1 we could have ocd.php with the CD skeleton and inclusions for the symbol declarations which are represented as files in the directory. e.g. arith1/plus.
That would make it quite simple to set up a structure that would make the cds meaningful.