Using L A T E X as a Semantic Markup Format
Michael Kohlhase · 2008
One of the great problems of Mathematical Knowledge Manage- ment (MKM) systems is to obtain access to a sufficiently large corpus of mathematical knowledge to allow the management/search/navigation tech- niques developed by the community to display their strength. Such systems usually expect the mathematical knowledge they operate on in the form of se- mantically enhanced documents, but mathematicians and publishers in Math- ematics have heavily invested into the TEX/L ATEX format and workflow. We analyze the current practice of semi-semantic markup in L ATE Xd ocu- ments and extend it by a markup infrastructure that allows to embed semantic annotations into L ATEX documents without changing their visual appearance. This collection of TEX macro packages is called sTE X( semantic T EX) as it al- lows to markup L ATEX documents semantically without leaving the time-tried TEX/L ATEX workflow, essentially turning L ATEX into an MKM format. At the heart of sTEX 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 sTEX macro collection on a large case study: the course materials of a two-semester course in Computer Science was annotated se- mantically and converted to the OMDoc MKM format by Bruce Miller's LaTeXML system. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000). 68U15.