Session on Electronic Publication

On Monday, August 24 1998, TU Berlin, H 104 there will be an afternoon on electronic publication that starts out with a "technical session" where reports are given on developments important for mathematics:

MSC 2000,: the new version of the Mathematics Subject Classification
Metadata,: a new tool for the description and location of electronic documents (or document like objects)
MATHML,: possibly the future "language" for storing mathematical texts electronically.

The key activity of the afternoon will be a podium discussion, chaired by IMU President David Mumford, involving 7 persons representing different groups active in electronic publication. The topic of this podium discussion is

"The Future of Electronic Communication, Information and Publishing".

This should be of interest to all those who worry about the future of mathematical publishing and about the access to mathematical publications.

The schedule for this session is

Monday, August 24, 1998

Chairman: Peter Michor (Vienna, Austria)

14:00-14:30 "The year 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification, MSC2000"

Jane Kister, Mathematical Reviews, USA;
Bernd Wegner, Zentralblatt fuer Mathematik, Germany:

Since 1996, the editors of Mathematical Reviews (MR) and Zentralblatt fuer Mathematik (ZBL) have been collaborating on a revision of the 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC). It is planned that the classification, MSC2000, will be used by the two journals starting in the year 2000. We will present the new classification, in particular describing the principles underlying the revision and the major changes in the MSC.

14:30-15:00 "Mathematical Metadata"

Judith Pluemer, University of Osnabrueck, Germany:

Publishing an article in a mathematical journal takes quite some time. That is the reason why mathematicians make their scientific work available on the internet in form of preprints. Resource discovery of mathematical preprints should be faciliated. What one wants is high quality retrieval for high quality material. We show how the use of MetaData allows for a suitable search engine. Creation of MetaData can be done by authors or providers of preprint servers using freely available forminterfaces. In short, we will demonstrate a prototype of MPRESS as the EMS will name the service for retrieval of distributed mathematical preprints in Europe, for further information, see www.mathematik.uni-osnabrueck.de/harvest/brokers/FraGer/

15:00-15:30 "An Introduction to MATHML"

Stephen Buswell, Stilo Technology, UK

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) has recently been published as a Recommendation by the World Wide Consortium (W3C). The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received and processed on the Web. This paper discusses the issues involved with display and processing of mathematics on the Web and outlines the XML-based solution developed. This solution supports the encoding of both presentation and semantic content of mathematical expressions. The relationship between MathML and existing standards and formats such as TeX is discussed. An overview of MathML- compliant tools (existing and under development) for the creation and processing will be given.

15:30-15:45 Discussion

15:45-16:15 Coffee Break

16:15-18:00 Panel Discussion

"The future of mathematical communication, information and publishing"

Chairman: David Mumford (Providence, IMU president)

Panelists (in alphabetic order):

Neil Calkin (Clemson, Electronic Journal of Combinatorics): Electronic journals
John Ewing (Providence, American Mathematical Society): Views of learned societies
Martin Groetschel (Berlin, German Mathematical Society): Information and communication networks
Joachim Heinze (Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag): Views of a scientific commercial publisher
Carol Hutchins (New York, Courant Institute Library): The situation of libraries
Peter Michor (Vienna, European Mathematical Society): Electronic libraries
Richard Palais (Brandeis, Waltham, MA, USA): Electronic e-print servers

Each panelist will be given 5 to 10 minutes time to report his/her vision of the future. This will be followed by a broad discussion, including the audience.

ICM'98 homepage

Please send suggestions and corrections to: pahlig@zib.de
Last modified: August 7, 1998