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The Worldwide Web as we know it is a vast, sprawling collection of information stored in a variety of formats and held loosely together by hyperlinks. This is fine for human surfers who are able to filter out excess noise and understand natural languages, but it is no use if we want machines to be able to process and understand information. For this we need what Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, has called "The Semantic Web", where information is encoded according to well defined vocabularies (often known as ontologies) that are designed to make the meaning of data explicit and unambiguous. The development of the semantic web will make it possible to automate a wide variety of sophisticated interactions, which today require human intervention.
One area of interest is the possibility of offering mathematical algorithms through web services that can be accessed from a wide variety of software packages. The challenge is to develop a framework in which such services can describe their capabilities in as much detail as is necessary to allow a sophisticated software agent to select a suitable service based on an analysis of the characteristics of a user's problem.
The aim of the MONET project is to demonstrate the applicability of the latest ideas for creating a semantic web to the world of mathematical software, using sophisticated algorithms to match the characteristics of a problem to the advertised capabilities of available services and then invoking the chosen services through a standard mechanism. The resulting framework will be powerful, flexible and dynamic, yet robust and easy to navigate, putting state-of-the-art algorithms at the disposal of users anywhere in the world.
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