Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics Research (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 91-106
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From page 91... ...
The ultimate goal of these lists is to provide interesting and nontrivial connections between topics, in particular the user features described in Chapter 2. The committee believes this is best accomplished by the DML organization overseeing the simpler entity collections first, which may have the most impact.
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From page 92... ...
There are also some commercial entities providing metadata as linked open data,4 so there is a sense that these connections may be possible in the near future. The DML could provide dedicated search over this collection, with automated disambiguation of author names and superior subject navigation derived from graphical analysis of various forms of proximity between 1 Some encyclopedic resources include Wikipedia, Springer Encyclopedia of Mathematics, StatProb, MathWorld, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, etc.
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From page 93... ...
MathFunctions MathFunctions would be a collection of mathematical functions found throughout the literature. This collection can begin immediately, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF)
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Special functions are often kept out of sight in higher mathematical constructions but have applications to other branches of mathematics. Making it easier for users to follow threads of their occurrences across the literature might easily lead to novel discoveries or unexpected relations between research in different branches of mathematics.
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The collection that the committee envisions for the DML is complex and may require multiple steps. As a first step before embarking on a complete index, the DML could partner with resources such as MathSciNet and zbMATH to create a collection of journal article titles that contain any mathematical symbols.
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From page 96... ...
Other information on the contents of the presentation, which may be more difficult to automatically categorize, can be tagged by community sourcing. In terms of mathematician portraits, there are several images of mathematicians that may be of interest, such as Oberwolfach Photo Collection,9 Portraits of Statisticians,10 Microsoft Academic Search Profiles,11 Halmos (Beery and Mead, 2012)
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From page 97... ...
More recently, zbMATH Author Profiles and data in Microsoft Academic Search's Top Authors in Mathematics offer machine access to approximate authority records for about half a million authors in mathematics and related fields, with no apparent legal restriction on further processing of the data. It would be a straightforward application of machine processing and community input to deduplicate these lists, sync them also with the Virtual International Authority Files of all mathematicians, and thereby obtain a combined DML index of all mathematicians, both living and deceased, who have ever published a book or article in mathematics.
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From page 98... ...
Most of this data currently exists and is maintained openly by a number of agents (such as Ulf Rehmann, MathSciNet, zbMATH, the Online Computer Library Center) .13 There are several lists of math journals in various places, many of them accessible and reusable, but none of these lists provides easy access to the features that researchers would like, including the following: • Links to journal homepages whenever they exist; • Information about the number of articles published and subject areas covered; • Copyright and rights information for authors; and • Simple search over the list.
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14 Eigenfactor, http://www.eigenfactor.org/, accessed January 16, 2014. 15 Mostnotable are the British Library release of millions of catalog records in 2010 ( ritish B Library, 2010)
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From page 100... ...
MathSciNet's MRLookup tool already provides a useful open interface for acquisition of modest-sized bibliographies from data in MathSciNet. Similar data are readily available from Microsoft Academic or Google Scholar, but there is not yet any tool comparable to MRLookup for acquiring data from those sources, and neither is there any good tool for aggregation and deduplication of data from multiple sources, as would typically be neces 16 VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File, http://viaf.org/, accessed January 16, 2014.
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Some initial sources for these data include MathSciNet, arXiv, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Microsoft Academic, among others. There would be considerable connections between the other bibliographic entities proposed in this section.
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From page 102... ...
However, many current resources do not functionally handle mathematical notation and syntax, and this limits how the mathematical community can use these resources. Significant interest in better utilizing math-aware tools and services is apparent in the series of Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics.20 The following is from the announcement of their digital mathematics library conference track, chaired by Petr Sojka: Track objective is to provide a forum for development of math-aware technologies, standards, algorithms and formats towards fulfillment of the dream of global digital mathematical library (DML21)
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From page 103... ...
One math-aware standard of particular interest to DML developments proposed in this report is that of OpenMath,23 which is an extensible standard for representing the semantics of mathematical objects. The OpenMath website describes its objective as follows: OpenMath is an emerging standard for representing mathematical objects with their semantics, allowing them to be exchanged between computer programs, stored in databases, or published on the worldwide Web.
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From page 104... ...
However, once the tools are built and the editorial workflows established, these tools and workflows should be largely replicable across multiple distributed nodes in the network of bibliographic data stores contributing to the DML. The problems of identification and deduplication of conventional bibliographic records are by now largely solved.
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From page 105... ...
It is interesting to note that Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search deal with this problem reasonably well by using a statistical modeling approach rather than the more in-depth approach of writing down all possible transformations and then unraveling those transformations. Client-Side Software The DML would likely benefit from using a combination of client-side software and Web services to provide its content to users.
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From page 106... ...
2012. Painleve II in Random Matrix Theory and Related Fields.
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