Objectives

The main objective of the Open Geometry Textbook project is to design and implement a web-based platform for acquiring geometric knowledge to form a textbook via the collective intelligence of a massive number of web users and to study the feasibility of our open textbook approach for automated acquisition of knowledge in mathematics, with geometry as a special case. The project will also help build up a collection of geometric knowledge from netizens’ contributions and an integrated environment with sophisticated software tools for interested users to access, explore, communicate, disseminate, and publish geometric knowledge. Cuurent research and development focus on the following three aspects.

• Content Management
  
  
  
  • Design a versioned structural database to manage textbook contents (in natural languages and/or formalized representations), their revisions, and the results of assessments;
  
  
  • Develop assistant tools for data management, content authoring, and textbook rendering.
    


• Knowledge Processing
  
  
  
  • Design a formalized language for specifying geometric knowledge contents;
  
  
  • Develop/integrate software tools for validating contributions such as automated problem solving and diagram generation, theory consistency checking, proof/solution verification, and textbook structure soundness checking.
    


• Revision Assessment
  
  
  
  • Explore factors impacting the quanlity of a textbook;
  
  
  • Develop mechanisms to justify assessments.