Status Report: 9/6/2001
Scientific Documents on the Web
Graduate Student, Physics, OSU
Part of the CPUG project
This is ongoing research investigating the use of emergent technologies to make interactive scientific documents accessible using a web browser.
A fellow graduate student, Pom Wattanakasiwich, is conducting excellent research and content development. View here work here.
Pornrat Wattanakasiwich's Research
Why?
At present, the most widely used format for scientific documents on the web is portable document files or pdf. The disadvantage to using pdf is the documents are non interactive. With the use of XML technologies such as MathML and SVG one can create documents, which are interactive. There are great educational benefits for using these XML technologies. What is more XML documents are completely portable, in that they can be transformed to pdf, XHTML or any other type of document. These documents can also be read on any platform with an appropriate browser, allowing for wider dissemination. The ease of portability and interactive educational benefits are the primary reasons for investigating this new form of electronic book publishing.
Directions:
9/6/2001
Create example XML documents using source material with both MathML and SVG that can be viewed on a browser.
(in progress)
Create a framework for future publishing using XML technologies.
(in progress)
Build in interactivity to example documents.
(in progress)
Current technologies
(what works, what does not)
This field is changing on a day-to-day basis. All of the XML technologies are open source recommendations submitted by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C. The supporting software is being developed both by corporations and in the open source community. What follows below is a collection of links and some personal notes. Most of the initial testing is being done on Microsoft Windows 2000 and ME. Secondary testing is done on SUN Microsystems computers running Solaris 8. Open source and JAVA based software is being used where it can. If you know of any updates to this list or have problems, issues, concerns, or just general comments, please write.
Browsers/Plugins
Tested, as of 9/11/2001
Presently supports a rather strange reading of XML documents, does not seem to translate all the tags.
Plugins are aviable for SVG from Adobe. Adobe SVG Viewer 2.0 This version supports full interactive graphics with javascript.
Plugins are also available for MathML from IBM. IBM techexplorer 3.1 This supports MathML, TeX and LaTeX documents. Interactivity can also be built in using javascript.
Same support as Microsoft IE 5.5
Mozilla 0.9.3 SVG-MathML release
Supports native XML documents with MathML tags. Should support SVG although I have not gotten it to work yet.
Untested
WebEQ plugin, Amaya Browser Others?
For the latest news on all the technologies see