The SCIEnce project (Symbolic Computation Infrastructure for Europe), started in Spring 2006, brought together the developers of four powerful symbolic computation software packages (GAP, KANT,Maple and MuPAD) and a major symbolic computation research institute (RISC-Linz) supported by research groups expert in essential underpinning technologies, to unite the European community of researchers in, and users of, symbolic computation.

SCIEnce aims to promote the development of new software that is

• made more efficient by sharing components and expertise;
• made more interoperable in the modern Web services environment; and
• ready for the coming environment of Grid computing.

The project is an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative, funded by the European Commission under the Research Infrastructures Action of Framework 6. It began on April 1st, 2006 and runs until December 31st, 2011.

• Software composability through a standard web services interface
• Software access from symbolic computation systems to Grid Services and Computational Grids
• Knowledge dissemination and user training trough series of summer school and workshops.
• Personal access to facilities at RISC (see also list of user projects).

Software composability

Our work in this direction is centered around SCSCP what means the Symbolic Computation Software Composability Protocol. This protocol is a remote procedure call framework, in which both protocol messages and data are encoded in the OpenMath format. This is one of the important distinctive features of the protocol. The other one is that the OpenMath implementations stay mainly within the computer algebra systems rather than in custom-built wrappers.

The current version of the protocol is 1.3, released in March 2009 (see SCSCP page for downloads). The protocol is accompanied by two OpenMath content dictionaries, scscp1 and scscp2. Now a variety of SCSCP-compliant software tools is growing up, including:

• Support of OpenMath and SCSCP in the following computer algebra systems:
  • GAP - with packages SCSCP and openmath
  • KANT - with the KANT 4 SCSCP Package
  • Macaulay2 - with the OpenMath and SCSCP packages.
  • Mathematica - with the package SCSCP4Mathematica (available here).
  • MuPAD - with the MuPAD OpenMath Package
  • TRIP - built-in SCSCP client and server.

• Middleware and API:
  • C/C++library providing a C API to develop client and server SCSCP-compliant applications.
  • Java Library java.symcomp.org for Java API for SCSCP and OpenMath
  • POPCORN - convertor between OpenMath and Popcorn (Possibly Only Practicable Convenient OpenMath Replacement Notation).
  • WUPSI - Wonderful Universal Popcorn SCSCP Interface, a command line SCSCP-compliant interface.

• A prototype of the SCSCP client for the Coq proof assistant

Contacts

To contact us, please send email to the following address, removing spaces and replacing [at] and [dot] by corresponding symbols:

 alexk [at] mcs [dot] st-andrews [dot] ac [dot] uk

More Information

We received the Best Poster Award at ISSAC 2007. To download the PDF version of the poster, click here