Motivation. We wrote a great application for ActiveMath, called iCMap, which visualizes the structures of a mathematical domain and helps students to understand an recreate those structures. This tool is interactive and provides verification as well a suggestion mechanism. One of the key implementation problems in this tool is the lack of seperation between data (queries) and logic. Because iCMap requires inference mechanism to compute transitivities or fault-tolerances for verification, all those inferences are implemented in Java making heavy use of the MBase. This approach has several problems:

• MBase interface does no inferencing. Hence, it does not calculate the transitive closure for a learning item. iCMap computes that itself and requires for this action resources. Consequently, for one query, iCMap needs to contact the MBase several times. A reduction to one query with one result set as response is wished.
• Because inferencing is inside iCMap Java methods, adding new queries is not easy and requires a rebuild and deployment of the application.
• Queries are not reusable as they are embedded in iCMap. They are to some extent “cryptified”, i.e., you have to go through the code and understand it. A standard query language would solve the problem.

Solution. To overcome those deficiencies, I suggest to implement in addition to MBase a RDF Store for OMDoc learning object’s metadata information. This store will be optimized for RDF models, will include a reasoner for OWL (Lite/DL), and accept SPARQL queries. The component can run as a web-service and will be therefore reusable for other applications. Possible technologies for the implementation are Sesame or Jena.

Yesterday, I watched Steve Job’s keynote speech at the WWDC07. He mentioned that for writing iPhone applications there won’t be any SDK. Instead, they will support developers to write Web2.0+Ajax applications running in Safari which which is shipped together with the iPhone. So, the advantage is, developers can use well-experienced web-technologies and do not need to deal with distribution: you just access the application via a URL.

A year ago, we started a brainstorm discussion about Web2.0 applications (running on a PDA) to be integrate into ActiveMath. we had only a few ideas and nothing has been implemented yet. We are in delay and we should watch that we do not miss the train.

Here is another suggestion: ActiveMath Dictionary for the iPhone. I believe that on the long-term, PDAs will vanish and will be merged with mobile devices. Actually, this is already the case, we call those devices “Smartphones”, but they won’t make their way out of their business-targeted market. The iPhone addresses the regular customer and provides apart of an awesome UI,Wi-FI and EDGE to access the broadband. In principle, the iPhone is the PDA we always dreamed of and a tiny “notebook” for everyone.

My idea is quite simple and most of the implementation is already done. Just write an iPhone-ready GUI interface for “search”. (I still do not like this name. I’d like to call it “dictionary”, “search” sound more like an action.) We could offer this task as a bachelor thesis as soon as the iPhone comes out in Europe. I am pretty sure there will be computer science students who buy one and they will be thrilled to write an application for it. Maybe this task is too simple. I’d be happy to start another brainstorm session.