Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

John A. Koenig, Douglas B. Orr, Erol Ozil, David L. Rodgers

American Mathematical Society/Mathematical Reviews

In 1990, with National Science Foundation (NSF) assistance in the form of a 3-year grant, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) undertook development of the e-MATH system. This initiative distinguishes electronic communication from electronic publishing. Electronic communication is defined to be informal sharing of research ideas by electronic mail, file transfer, searchable databases, software components, and conferencing. Electronic publishing is reserved for applications involving formal reporting of research results, by electronic distribution of existing print journals, bibliographic retrieval, preprints, and (ultimately) by true electronic journals.

Beginning with the 1992 issue year, versions of the files used to produce the Bulletin of the AMS have been made available for electronic distribution through the e-MATH system. The Bulletin is a privilege-of-membership, primary journal for AMS members. It was selected because implementation required modest technical resources and it didn't threaten any significant revenue stream. Since mid-1991, again with assistance from NSF, e-MATH staff have been developing a software architecture for on-line editing that can support both journal production and next-generation electronic journals. The approach uses SQL document databases accessible from the Internet, SGML as the storage representation for documents, TeX (actually AMS-LaTeX) as a language of import/export, and UNIX/X Window as a non-proprietary hardware platform.

Use of de facto or international standards for retrieval, storage representation, and processing ensures that a system can be developed independent of any particular vendor technology. A kernel of system components has been developed:

• A parser generator that creates programs that parse instances of documents that conform to an arbitrary SGML document type definition (DTD) and

o database routines to populate SQL databases that can be used to store, retrieve, and save versions of documents.
o a grammar that transforms the SGML representation of a document into a AMS-LaTeX representation

• A parser that takes an AMS-LaTeX document and creates a target SGML representation.

These components have been embedded in an implementation for an on-line editing environment that uses INGRES as the database engine and ArborText's SGMLeditor as the editing tool. General purpose mechanisms have been developed to allow documents to be created, stored, retrieved, edited, and saved. Annotations can be posted and processed. The trail of editorial changes made to specific document elements (e.g., paragraphs, equations) is recorded and differences can be displayed. Hypertext links within and among documents are supported. Multi-media and live-link documents are supported.

At the Symposium, the following capabilities were demonstrated:

• Ability to take production files for Bulletin files and process them under software control to create valid SGML analogues.
  
• Ability to automatically create and populate INGRES document databases.
  
• Ability to retrieve, edit, and restore documents.
  
• Ability to annotate documents for general comments or specific changes in language.
  
• Ability to display deleted, changed, and added text in color-coded format.
  
• Ability to retrieve different versions of documents.
  
• Ability to include hypertext links and live-linked objects in documents. Initial deployment of the platform is scheduled for late 1993. It will be used for on-line editing of a subset of material that is published inMathematical Reviews.