Changes to the Specification

Abstract

After about 18 Months of development, Version 1.0 of the OMDoc format was released on November 1^st 2000 to give users a stable interface to base their documents and systems on. It was adopted by various projects in automated deduction, algebraic specification, and computer-supported education. The experience from these projects uncovered a multitude of small deficiencies and extension possibilities of the format, that have been subsequently discussed in the OMDoc community.

OMDoc 1.1 was released on December 29^th 2001 as an attempt to roll the uncontroversial and non-disruptive part of the extensions and corrections into a consistent language format. The changes to version 1.0 were largely conservative, adding optional attributes or child elements. Nevertheless, some non-conservative changes were introduced, but only to less used parts of the format or in order to remedy design flaws and inconsistencies of version 1.0.

OMDoc 1.2 is the mature version in the OMDoc 1 series of specifications. It contains almost no large-scale changes to the document format, except that Content-MathML is now allowed as a representation for mathematical objects. But many of the representational features have been fine-tuned and brought up to date with the maturing XML technology (e.g. ID attributes now follow the XML ID specification [MVW05], and the Dublin Core elements follow the official syntax [DUB03a]). The main development is that the OMDoc specification, the DTD, and schema are split into a system of interdependent modules that support independent development of certain language aspects and simpler specification and deployment of sub-languages. Version 1.2 freezes the development so that version 2 can be started off on the modules.

In the following, we will keep a log on the changes that have occurred in the released versions of the OMDoc format. We will briefly tabulate the changes by element name. For the state of an element we will use the shorthands “dep” for deprecated (i.e. the element is no longer in use in the new OMDoc version), “cha” for changed, if the element is re-structured (i.e. some additions and losses), “new” if did not exist in the old OMDoc version, “lib”, if it was liberalized (e.g. an attribute was made optional) and finally “aug” for augmented, i.e. if it has obtained additional children or attributes in the new OMDoc version.

All changes will be relative to the previous version, starting out with OMDoc 1.0.