The OpenMath framework for transmitting mathematical objects over the Internet relies on the concept of Content Dictionaries (CDs) to define the semantics of mathematical objects. This is an essential measure for establishing a meaningful communication amongst mathematical software systems (and humans). Currently, the infrastructure for conceiving, administering, viewing CDs is limited to a file-based almost flat repository. In this paper, we propose to use the OMDoc extension of the OpenMath Xml encoding as an infrastructure to express and manipulate content dictionary information. OMDoc extends OpenMath by adding support for document markup (making the CDs more readable to the human user) and structured specification (making them more explicit, formal, and allow the user to reuse, and inherit CD information in a flexible, but well-defined way).

Mathematical Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.3.2 Autonomy and Decentralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.3.3 Coordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3 Distributed Articial Intelligence 12 3.1 Agent-Oriented Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 3.2 The Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.3 Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 4 Agent Technology for Distributed Mathematical Reasoning 15 4.1 MathWeb Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 4.2 Communication between MathWeb agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 4.2.1 Technical Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 4.2.2 Characterization of Reasoning Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 4.2.3 Context in Mathematical Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 4.3 Coordination of MathWeb Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 5 Summary and Work Plan 22 5.1 Work Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 1