panta rhei
panta rhei — everything flows. These two words characterize the study of Heraclitus1, who argued that the world is a permanently becoming and vanishing one, in which everything constantly changes. This also applies to the area of modern knowledge management technologies and Web2.0, which revolutionized the WWW and transformed it into a more social, user friendly, emergent, and flexible network, in which users have become media producers and web applications became more open and social, while at the same time improving their mutual integration.
Philosophers have built the foundation of many scientific disciplines that we can enjoy nowadays. Our passion belongs to mathematics, which we believe to be the fundament for any other discipline include hard science such as computer science, engineering, and physiscs, life science such as medicine, biology, and chemistry, as well as social science. The KWARC research group focuses on the area of mathematics and aims at providing theoretic and pragmatic frameworks and tools that support any users - from pure mathematicians (researchers), to applied mathematicians, to novice such as students and users with rather limited to none mathematical background. Many projects have arisen around our Open Mathematical Document Format (OMDoc) - a mathematical data model and ontology language.
The panta rhei system is a proof-of-concept prototype which aims at integration social technologies such as in the Web2.0 and Semantic Web community with materials represented in OMDoc.
The system is an interactive and collaborative community tool that facilitates the discussion, tagging, rating, and annotation of semantically enriched mathematical content. For evaluation purpose, panta rhei is currently used within our General Computer Science lecture.
[1] The words panta rhei do not orginate from Heraclitus, but come from Simplicius. The connection to Heraclitus was provided by Plato.