eds.activemath.org

A nifty feature has just emerged on daily activemath builds and jEditOQMath: advanced metadata inheritance. Basically, it allows an author to avoid most of the repetition of metadata by simply putting that metadata in an enclosing element.

The idea is that it is natural for an author to keep things that have the same taste in the same containers: for example keep learning-items that are for the same field or the same educational level wiithin the same OMDoc file or theory element. I have a good hope that it will enable authors to easier create content that can be intelligently processed by the tutorial component and the user-model.

• A little presentation on how it can be enjoyed by authors is in the mov video.
• A more detailed explanation is the paper about Content storage and authoring patterns

This feature is available in the java-web-start based jEditOQMath along with a nightly ActiveMath (on the trunk). Depending on feedback of early authors we should be able to bring it to the authoring binaries soon.

One thing worth noting is that this heavily depends on the DTD file used which is maintained as part of each collection: for an existing collection to start enjoying metadata inheritance, it should grab the newer DTDs (from omdoc1/dtd in ActiveMath, or creating a new collection in jEditOQMath) and make sure each of the OQMath files still validate.

Comments are welcome.