SWiM is a semantic wiki for collaboratively building, editing and browsing a mathematical knowledge base. Its pages, containing mathematical theories or content dictionaries, are stored in OMDoc or OpenMath, both being markup format for mathematical knowledge. Our long-term objective is to develop a software that facilitates the creation of a shared, public collection of mathematical knowledge (e.g. for education) and serves work groups of mathematicians as a tool for collaborative development of new theories.

The implementation of SWiM, based on IkeWiki, is currently in a prototype stage. SWiM is available for download under the GNU GPL. Bugs and to-dos are documented in our issue tracker. See the MathWeb wiki for instructions about downloading a documentation of current on-goings in the SWiM project and related projects.

An online demo is available. SWiM is in production use for the revision of the OpenMath 3 Content Dictionaries at wiki.openmath.org, where you can browse the content dictionaries, and where OpenMath 3 developers can edit.

So far, SWiM offers the basic wiki features (editing, linking, and browsing) for mathematical content:

• Easy editing (the basics, a lot remains to be done):
  • Formula editor for OpenMath formulae (supporting the OpenMath standard content dictionaries)
  • ASCII syntax for more complex OpenMath formulae
  • Dedicated metadata editor
  • Rich annotation toolbar
  • Planned:
    • section-wise editing of long, structured pages
    • an interface to your favorite text editor application on your computer, i.e. the possibility to download a document from the wiki, edit it locally, and have it uploaded again automatically.
• Linking is a bit simplified compared to standard OMDoc, as there is a short-hand syntax for link targets in the wiki. An ontology-based auto-completion of link targets, which only suggests existing pages of the type required by the the current link, is planned.
• Thanks to the include mechanism of the OMDoc presentation style sheets, complete content dictionaries or theories can be viewed at once, even if they are physically split into smaller items in the wiki. Mathematical symbols are linked to their declarations (which are on different wiki pages in most cases). Semantic relations between mathematical theories and statements (e.g. one theory importing another one, statements made in the context of a theory, proofs proving theorems, definitions defining symbols, etc.) are displayed as links, grouped by type, on a navigation sidebar.

Outlines of several use cases where users can benefit from using SWiM will be added here soon.

See my paper for the MathUI 07 workshop for further details about SWiM's user interface; a full description of the old SWiM 0.1, including the theoretical background, is given in a technical report.