The Semantic Web is not Restricted to Ontologies!

The semantic web is a nice strand. Something where AI should be able to do a huge job based on the massive knowledge spread around the web. Is it about AI or more generally machine processabiity? The last call for paper for the WWW conference actually broadened the semantic web track call to “Semantic / Data Web”.

I recently had a very simple request… soooo simple: our user just wishes to copy the formula from Mathematica (which can copy it in MathML) and paste it on something that does web.

I just went around and tried… SeaMonkey should support that in editor and reader: copy a piece of HTML with MathML and paste it, didn’t even work… my 1/x became a place full of nbsps in three lines!

Recently, Bob Matthews posted a mathtype trick, something that was not new to me, but something that struck me this time: you can, now, copy-and-paste from Wikipedia, shown in a current browser, into MathType (so into Word or PowerPoint).

A new draft of MathML-3 has just come out. It has a bunch of good maturations. But it also has a very nice new section on clipboard support which could generalize.

… is finally working… I’m pretty proud of it… undoubtedly, it’s the way to stimulate discovery of math input.

This page attempts to recollect a large amount of pointers to specifications, articles, API-documents, and attempts that related to the clipboard and more generally to user-initiated transfers, such as copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop as we know them in common desktop environments.

It comes as an attempt to clarify a few ideas in order to propose sensible copy-and-paste facilities that web-page scripts could influence.