The OMDoc Format

OMDoc is a markup format and data model for Open Mathematical Documents. It serves as semantics-oriented representation format and ontology language for mathematical knowledge.

Multi-level Content Markup

OMDoc differs from the presentation-based approaches surveyed in this status report on Math on the Web in that it concentrates on representing the meaning of mathematical formulae instead of their appearance. OMDoc is an extension of the OpenMath and MathML. It extends these formats by markup for the document, statement and theory level of mathematical documents, so that the document author can specify them and the consumer (an OMDoc reader or a mathematical software system) can take advantage of them.

This allows to develop semantics-based added-value services for displaying and manipulating mathematical formulae and structured documents. more

Design Goals: the OMDoc format aims to

1. be ‘ontologically uncommitted’ (like the OpenMath format), so that it can serve as an ‘integration format’ for mathematical software systems.
2. provide a representation format for ‘mathematical documents’ that combine ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ views of all the ‘mathematical knowledge’ contained in them.
3. be based on ‘sound logic/representational principles’ (as not to embarrass the author in front of his colleagues from automated reasoning)
4. be based on ‘structural/content markup’ to guarantee both 1. and 2. To ensure manageability of the format OMDoc is a modular format to allow language subsetting, embedding and extensions.

Status & History

The current stable version of the OMDoc format is OMDoc1.2 which was released in December 2001 and is considered the mature state of OMDoc 1. History

Work on OMDoc Version 2 has started. more

Resources

Examples, tools and systems, the OMDoc distribution, …