Stan Devitt - The Relationship between OpenMath and MathML

The primary purpose of OpenMath is to facilitate reliable communication of mathematical objects between mathematical applications. To accomplish this the actual meanings of the objects must be available. To see why consider that in the absence of such definitions we would be unable to determine if D² y represents two applications of the differential operator D to the function y, or is simply a monomial corresponding to the square of the symbol D multiplied by the the symbol y, where D and y are elements in some algebra chosen by the author. In this talk we review the current status of the OpenMath standard, how it is being used, and how this relates to similar requirements for the communication of mathematical meaning in MathML.