Towards OpenMath Content Dictionaries as Linked Data

“The term ‘Linked Data’ refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the web” [7]. Linked Data make the Semantic Web work practically, which means that information can be retrieved without complicated lookup mechanisms, that a lightweight semantics enables scalable reasoning, and that the decentral nature of the Web is respected. OpenMath Content Dictionaries (CDs) have the same characteristics – in principle, but not yet in practice. The Linking Open Data movement has made a considerable practical impact: Governments, broadcasting stations, scientific publishers, and many more actors are already contributing to the “Web of Data”. Queries can be answered in a distributed way, and services aggregating data from different sources are replacing hard-coded mashups. However, these services are currently entirely lacking mathematical functionality. I will discuss real-world scenarios, where today’s RDF-based Linked Data do not quite get their job done, but where an integration of OpenMath would help – were it not for certain conceptual and practical restrictions. I will point out conceptual shortcomings in the OpenMath 2 specification and common bad practices in publishing CDs and then propose concrete steps to overcome them and to contribute OpenMath CDs to the Web of Data. 1 Linked Data State of the Art The Linked Data principles, established by Berners-Lee in 2006 [4] consist of four simple rules for publishing machine-understandable data on the web1: 1. Use URIs to identify things. 2. Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up (“dereferenced”) by people and user agents.2 3. Provide useful3 information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using standard formats such as RDF/XML. 4. Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data to improve discovery of other related information on the Web. 1 here cited as paraphrased by Wikipedia [29] 2 I. e., the URI is treated as a URL. 3 This usually means: machine-understandable. ar X iv :1 00 6. 40 57 v1 [ cs .D L ] 2 1 Ju n 20 10