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The Document Vault was intended to provide the basis for the flexible creation and use of on-line, multi-media documents. In particular, a mechanism for the inclusion of arbitrary types of information into a document is needed to support standard archiving and distribution practices on the Internet. The basic Vault features include:

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Consequently, a document can be authored by including text, images, sounds, data, network pointers to the same or other forms of information and then served in any form required, for either local or network consumption. There is only one authorized document and so maintenance is limited to a minimum.
Originally, the Vault project was initiated to alleviate problems related to the maintenance and development of electronic archives. Anonymous FTP, Gopher and World Wide Web (WWW) archives are distinct in how the contents of each type of archive are typically organized. This is largely due to the nature of the underlying protocols. Moreover, the type of information varies: raw or compressed data files are the norm for FTP, ASCII text is the most useful for Gopher and HTML-structured multi-media is appropriate for the Web. Worse, the concept of a document is not clearly defined since a mix of images, sounds, text (ASCII and formatted) and data may be required. For a site offering services in each, problems of document authority, duplication and redundant maintenance chores are difficult to cope with.

The form in which a document appears in the Proceedings has been determined by archival demands, providing automated access to the various formats of the available documents through a single adaptable interface. Its potential as an aid to authoring was not explored as our focus was on the activation of the mathematical content.



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Contents Next: Annotation System Up: Software Used to Previous: Computer Algebra Systems


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