Semantics for Web-Based Mathematical Education Systems

Web-based user-adaptive learning environments suggest a semantic knowledge representation that can be reused in different contexts. Moreover, if these educational systems employ external service systems for support or for exploratory activities, the semantic representation is a basis for the interoperability of the service systems and for machine-understandable data. ActiveMath is such a learning environment for mathematics. We show what its annotated semantic knowledge representation, extended OMDoc, is like and how it is used. We also discuss the current bottleneck of authoring. Since mathematicians are mostly familiar with authoring LTEX rather than semantic XML, ActiveMath offers a LTEX2OMDoc tool. As compared with the direct OMDoc authoring which is not yet visually supported this has pros and cons.