Using as a Semantic Markup Format

One of the great problems of Mathematical Knowledge Management (MKM) systems is to obtain access to a sufficiently large corpus of mathematical knowledge to allow the management/search/navigation techniques developed by the community to display their strength. Such systems usually expect the mathematical knowledge they operate on in the form of semantically enhanced documents, but mathematicians and publishers in Mathematics have heavily invested into the format and workflow. We analyze the current practice of semi-semantic markup in documents and extend it by a markup infrastructure that allows to embed semantic annotations into documents without changing their visual appearance. This collection of macro packages is called (semantic ) as it allows to markup documents semantically without leaving the time-tried workflow, essentially turning into an MKM format. At the heart of is a definition mechanism for semantic macros for mathematical objects and a non-standard scoping construct for them, which is oriented at the semantic dependency relation rather than the document structure. We evaluate the macro collection on a large case study: the course materials of a two-semester course in Computer Science was annotated semantically and converted to the OMDoc MKM format by Bruce Miller’s LaTeXML system.