Enabling Collaboration on Semiformal Mathematical Knowledge by Semantic Web Integration

Mathematics is becoming increasingly collaborative, but software does not sufficiently support that: Social Web applications do not currently make mathematical knowledge accessible to automated agents with a deeper understanding of mathematical structures. Such agents exist but focus on individual research tasks, such as authoring, publishing, peer-review, or verification, instead of complex collaboration workflows. This work effectively enables their integration by bridging the document-oriented perspective of mathematical authoring and publishing, and the network perspective of threaded discussions and Web information retrieval. This is achieved by giving existing representations of mathematical and relevant related knowledge about applications, projects and people a common Semantic Web foundation. Service integration is addressed from the two perspectives of enriching published documents by embedding assistive services, and translating between different knowledge representations inside knowledge bases. A usability evaluation of a semantic wiki that coherently integrates knowledge production and consumption services points out the remaining challenges in making such heterogeneously integrated environments support realistic workflows. The results of this thesis will soon also enable collaborative acquisition of new mathematical knowledge, as well as the contribution of existing knowledge collections to the Web of Data.