Semantics of OpenMath and MathML3

Even though OpenMath has been around for more than 10?years, there is still confusion about the ??semantics of OpenMath??. As the recent MathML3 recommendation semantically bases Content MathML on OpenMath Objects, this question becomes more pressing. One source of confusions about OpenMath semantics is that it is given on two levels: a very weak algebraic semantics for expression trees, which is extended by considering mathematical properties in content dictionaries that interpret the meaning of (constant) symbols. While this two-leveled way to interpret objects is well-understood in logic, it has not been spelt out rigorously for OpenMath. We present two denotational semantics for OpenMath: a construction-oriented semantics that achieves full coverage of all legal OpenMath expressions at the cost of great conceptual complexity, and a symbol-oriented one for a subset of OpenMath expressions. This subset is given by a variant of the OpenMath 2 role system, which??we claim??does not exclude any representations of meaningful mathematical objects.