Constantin Jucovschi

Constantin Jucovschi

The Semantic Alliance (SAlly) Framework, first presented at MKM 2012, allows integration of Mathematical Knowledge Management services into typical applications and end-user workflows. From an architecture allowing invasion of spreadsheet programs, it grew into a middle-ware connecting spreadsheet, CAD, text and image processing environments with MKM services. The architecture presented in the original paper proved to be quite resilient as it is still used today with only minor changes. This paper explores extensibility challenges we have encountered in the process of developing new services and maintaining the plugins invading end-user applications. After an analysis of the underlying problems, I present an augmented version of the SAlly architecture that addresses these issues and opens new opportunities for document type agnostic MKM services.

Thilo Breitsprecher, Mihai Codescu, Constantin Jucovschi et al.

The engineering design process follows a series of standardized stages of development, which have many aspects in common with software engineering. Among these stages, the principle solution can be regarded as an analogue of the design specification, fixing as it does the way the final product works. It is usually constructed as an abstract sketch (hand-drawn or constructed with a CAD system) where the functional parts of the product are identified, and geometric and topological constraints are formulated. Here, we outline a semantic approach where the principle solution is annotated with ontological assertions, thus making the intended requirements explicit and available for further machine processing; this includes the automated detection of design errors in the final CAD model, making additional use of a background ontology of engineering knowledge. We embed this approach into a document-oriented design workflow, in which the background ontology and semantic annotations in the documents are exploited to trace parts and requirements through the design process and across different applications.

Constantin Jucovschi

Integration of MKM services into editors has been of big interest in both formal as well as informal areas of MKM. Until now, most of the efforts to integrate MKM services into editing environments are done on an individual basis which results in high creation and maintenance costs. In this paper, I propose an architecture which allows editing environments and MKM services to be integrated in a more efficient way. This is accomplished by integrating editors and services only once with a real-time document synchronization and service broker. Doing so, simplifies the development of services as well as of editor integrations. My experience suggests that integrating new services into an arbitrary number of already integrated editors can take as little as 3-4 hours of work.