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On the MKM list (Mathematical Knowledge Management), I just read about a very interesting initiative by chemists. A publisher is doing semantic markup of their data. As the poster on the MKM list noted, it is rather sad that it is chemists that are leading here. Mathematicians gave it a half-hearted try (see the mostly defunct OpenMath or the highly-hyped but mostly ignored MathML). But this is probably because semantics of mathematics is so incredibly hard! The efforts in OpenMath and MathML in that direction were really lame, which probably contributed to their uneffectiveness. It is also why the QED Project went nowhere. There are some serious efforts at mathematical semantics: in particular I rather like Coq, but there are others as well. There are also some other efforts (PlanetMath, MathWorld, and of course Wikipedia) which are more aimed at humans rather than machine-readability. Most telling in all this is how the Numerical Mathematics Consortium is ignoring MathML, OpenMath as well as all the huge investment in previous formalization efforts. Their aim is laudable, their methodology seems unscientific.

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