SBIR-STTR Award

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

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to develop rich-media adaptive authoring tools for e-learning content creation for collaborative documents for science and mathematics. The proposed objective is to remove technical barriers that impede development and deployment of e-learning content, and to advance tools that create structured content from multiple cooperating document types. The research objectives of this Phase II project will extend the Lexicon adaptive authoring framework developed in Phase I, as measured by compound document authoring issues exhibited by the QTI XML binding, which we will use as a vehicle to advance the adaptive authoring framework. The project will elaborate the Lexicon operator declarations to provide conventional authoring behavior needed for QTI markup elements, according to a progressive schedule of regular project milestones. At the end of the project, it is anticipated that the Lexicon will represent an adaptive authoring tool for rich-media collaborative documents with full language support for QTI markup, as a means for authoring and delivering e-learning content. Additional configuration language improvements and configuration authoring tools will position Lexicon to adapt to a wide range of compound XML document types for e-learning content, and extended programming interfaces will enable Lexicon to embed into a wide range of collaborative e-learning applications. Education in the U.S. is currently undergoing a transition to the digital age that will impact every aspect of teaching and learning. The current generation of collaboration tools are text-based,and do not support the notation needed to communicate mathematics. This project seeks to develop a suite of collaboration tools that have native support for mathematical notation, so that students and instructors can communicate scientific and mathematical concepts more effectively. This Phase II project aims to will extend the Lexicon adaptive authoring framework developed in Phase I, to support embedded semantic markup needed to deliver rich instructional content, and to position Lexicon to support a series of collaborative e-learning applications that are enabled by a relatively small amount of semantic markup: MathIM, an instant messaging application, prototyped during Phase I, that allows users include mathematical notation in person-to-person chat messages; MathWiki, a web-based forum application that supports communities of users who share an interest in topics that require mathematical notation; MathSpace, an online authoring environment for creating student worksheets; and MathME, or the Math Media Environment, a 'virtual notebook' in which students can record the work they are doing online