Math Diss International

Abstract

In view of the different demands posed on dissertations by societies and scientists in any field, global access to the documents from a single source remains impossible. In the field of mathematics, additional points stemming for the relative frequent inclusion of formulas in mathematic dissertations must be considered. Within the scope of the project MathDiss International, a permanent international online fulltext-document server for mathematical dissertations will be established. In the near future, this server will be accessible in Math-Net, which is open worldwide. In connection, questions concerning an online presentation of the documents and the problems of a long-term archiving (from TeX resp. LaTeX documents) will be considered. These questions include how to homogenize such files in order to make their later conversion into programming languages following XML possible. Furthermore, the expansion of research possibilities using online documents is being planned. Providing access to the tables of contents, lists of tables and illustrations and bibliographies on the LaTeX level is of top priority. These are the first steps to realize a efficient retrieval. The next step should be the change of mathematical writing. This project will try to start an initiative to write mathematical texts in MathML and not longer in TeX or LaTeX. The conversion from MathML to \TeX is no problem, but the other way is more difficult, because the semantic information we have only in MathML and not in TeX must be entered into the text