SBIR Phase I: Adaptive Authoring for Compound XML Documents: Collaboration Tools and eLearning Content Creation for STEM

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research project seeks to establish the feasibility of creating intuitive user interfaces that enable direct authoring of compound XML documents, and especially to documents that include mathematical and scientific notation. The project will produce a preliminary framework for customizable XML editing interfaces, as well as prototypes for an instant messaging client and a web-based discussion board that support MathML markup. The key innovation in this work is the development of a configurable authoring framework that implements the different editing modes needed to create content using diverse XML vocabularies, and that negotiates the transitions and relationships among these vocabularies as they come together to produce documents that are rich in information and potentially interactive. This framework will extend to multiple XML vocabularies a similar framework that Integre has previously developed for the single vocabulary of MathML. Collaboration tools like instant messaging and web discussion boards are now used pervasively in both educational and social contexts, but are underutilized by mathematics and scientific communities because these tools lack sufficient support for mathematical notation. This project will result in first-generation applications that let math and science students engage more fully in web-based collaborative learning, that let students and their instructors communicate concepts more clearly using current technologies, and that foster the development of online research communities. Subsequent research will provide a means of creating more informative and responsive content for web-based instruction. The proposed authoring framework directly addresses an issue that is critical to the further development and impact of XML as a standard and that has been pursued in various forms within the standards community, namely the ability to integrate multiple XML vocabularies on an as-needed basis to capture as much information as possible within a document. This research will inform the discussion of such compound documents, and potentially contribute to the ongoing advancement of XML technologies.