## Main goals
Semiannual OpenDreamKit project meeting joined with a WP6 ``Data/Knowledge/Software bases’’ kickoff workshop dedicated to the exploration of how mathematical knowledge could be better represented and exploited within systems and for communicating between systems.
## OpenDreamKit implication
St Andrews hosted this event which was organized by Paris Sud (project meeting) and Jacobs Uni (WP6 workshop).
## Event summary
Tuesday morning was dedicated to OpenDreamKit’s semiannual steering committee meeting, including progress reports from all sites. A couple additional OpenDreamKit participants joined physically or remotely for this meeting.
The rest of the week was dedicated to Work Package 6 activities. To bootstrap the
discussions, we started with a presentation by Michael Kohlhase of his ideas for a
Knowledge First strategy\footnote{This eventually became the Math-in-the-Middle''
paradigm~\cite{DehKohKon:iop16}}, followed by presentations of how knowledge is
represented in various components of OpenDreamKit (FindStat: Viviane Pons, LMFDB: Paul-Olivier
Dehaye, GAP: Markus Pfeiffer, SageMath: Nicolas M. Thiéry), in preparation for
\longdelivref{dksbases}{design}. There was also a brief presentation of a
proof-of-concept Knowledge-aware Sage-GAP interface developed the week before at the
GAP/Sage Days. Current practices where discussed as well: commonalities indumping
math data on the web’’ process (FindStat, LMFDB,…). Then came a tutorial presentation of
MMT to explore how knowledge representation in MMT could serve as a generic knowledge
backbone for integrating the various systems. After these warm up activities, we moved
on to brainstorms and joint code sprints, developing proof-of-concepts formalizations of
the knowledge in the various components and exploring applications: detecting bugs and
inconsistencies in code and data, generating more complete documentation, supporting
generic handle interfaces, …
A fine grained report of the activities is available here.
Results and impact
The Math-in-the-Middle approach was born at this workshop. This led to a joint paper at the CICM conference~\cite{DehKohKon:iop16} and kicked off and fueled much of the activity on WP6 since then, in particular around \longtaskref{dksbases}{data-design}, \delivref{dksbases}{design}, \delivref{dksbases}{dkstheories}, and \delivref{component-architecture}{semantic-interface-sage-gap}.
\begin{figure}[ht] \caption*{WP6 Workshop: Knowledge representation in mathematical software and databases} \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{pictures/2016-01-25-DKS-group-picture.jpg} \end{figure}