PREPRINT

This paper has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE Advances in Digital Libraries Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, May 19-21, 1999. It will appear in final form in the conference proceedings to be published by the IEEE Computer Society.

Design of a Digital Mathematical Library
for Science, Technology and Education

Daniel W. Lozier, Bruce R. Miller and Bonita V. Saunders

Abstract:

The concept of a digital library is of proven worth because of its ability to provide dramatic capabilities that are impossible with traditional print media. We are interested in providing such capabilities for scientific, technical and educational users of mathematical reference data. Our attention is focused on the highly specialized field of mathematics that is concerned with the properties, application and computation of the elementary and higher mathematical functions. Calling upon domain experts worldwide for assistance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is conducting an ambitious project to construct, ab initio, a comprehensive and authoritative Web resource on this subject. The need to make effective use of the latest developments in digital library research is a major focus, as is the development of content. In this paper we discuss our approach to such difficulties as the representation, display and manipulation of symbolic expressions, numerical data and graphical visualizations, and we describe a prototype Web site that has been constructed to test, evaluate and advance the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions project.

Keywords: Database, Digital Library, Document Conversion, Mathematics, Special Functions, Visualization, World Wide Web.

Footnotes

... Education

This work is supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract DAAH 04-95-1-0595.