User:Fletchjp

Introduction
I have come here because I am interested in mathematics. As well as my work in Chemical Engineering I teach mathematics to the Computer Science students at Aston University. That came about because of my interest in Clifford Algebra, which came about because of my curiosity about things.

realname:=John Fletcher

Clifford Algebra
I then wanted to be able to compute Clifford Algebra using symbolic computing. I started with SymbolicC++ and combined that with Tcl/Tk to build a simple interactive system which I described in a paper on Symbolic Algebra.

GlucSym
I moved on from that to use GluCat for the Clifford Algebra and GiNaC for the symbolic algebra. I have called this GlucSym and intend to make it public along with GluCat. These codes are in C++ but I have always wanted to have an interpreted version to enable programming on the fly and presentation into web pages. I have developed interface code using SWIG to enable use from Ruby but most of this should be achievable from Python as well.

MathML
One of the problems with this work is that the results, although valid, are long algebraic expressions which are beyond the human mind to comprehend. Yet they have a use as results which could be applied to the solution to practical problems. I needed to store the data somehow, and found MathML just around the time I would have needed to invent something similar. I then could put some interface code into the Ruby to output the results as XML using MathML.

E4Graph
At the same time I needed to store the information, in the same structured way. For this I have been using Metakit and e4Graph, which together have the ability to store, import and export XML and I have adapted them slightly to work with RDF.

RDF
Around the same time I realised that I wanted to store information about the expressions, and that this would not be just algebra, but names, dates, etc. I thought in terms of Categories, but then went to a talk by the author of Redland and had my eyes opened to RDF and ontologies such as Dublin Core.

Integrated System
Redland provides a means of storing RDF in a persistent database. I am currently exploring tools such as Zope, Plone and Zwiki to store information in a way which could be interchanged with a database using Python. These don't yet have the semantic capability I am seeking, and I need to add other tools into the mix to get a complete set of tools. In the course of all this I came across some examples which use SVG to present graphical output into a web page, which is something of interest to me.

Comments
I am much more at ease with the back end of the computing, though I am an experienced wiki person on the original WikiWikiWeb. It is certainly a different pattern of thinking when using semantic markup.

Resources

 * Paper on Symbolic Algebra 2001
 * Home page on WikiWikiWeb

Ontoworld links

 * Home page on ontoworld
 * ontoworld:OntoClean