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1 Introduction and installation
1.1 Brief description of the package
1.2 Installation of the package

### 1 Introduction and installation

#### 1.1 Brief description of the package

The GAP package OpenMath provides an OpenMath phrasebook for GAP: it allows GAP users to import and export mathematical objects encoded in OpenMath for the purpose of exchanging them with other OpenMath-enabled applications.

This manual describes:

- how to view OpenMath representation of an object;

- how to read OpenMath object from stream or write it to stream for the purposes of exchange with another OpenMath-enabled application;

- how to find which objects can be converted to/from OpenMath using this package;

- how to extend the package to support private OpenMath content dictionaries.

For the detailed information about OpenMath standard and content dictionaries see the OpenMath homepage http://www.openmath.org.

For practical purposes, the OpenMath package will be most efficient if used in conjunction with the GAP package SCSCP ([KL]) which implements the Symbolic Computation Software Composability protocol ([FHKLR]). This protocol specifies an OpenMath-based remote procedure call framework, in which all messages (procedure calls and returns of results of successful computation or error messages) are encoded in OpenMath using content dictionaries scscp1 and scscp2 ([FHKLLRa], [FHKLLRb]). Using the SCSCP package, GAP can communicate locally or remotely with any other OpenMath-enabled SCSCP-compliant application which may be not only another computer algebra system but also another instance of the GAP system or even, for example, an external C/C++ or Java application. Such communication will go into a seamless manner with the GAP/OpenMath conversion going in the background.

#### 1.2 Installation of the package

To use the OpenMath package it is required to install the GAPDoc package [LN] to use the help system and parse OpenMath objects in the XML format.

To install the OpenMath package, unpack the archive and place the `openmath` directory in the `pkg` subdirectory of your GAP4.4 installation. When you don't have write access to the directory of your main GAP installation, you can also install the package outside the GAP main directory by unpacking it inside a directory `MYGAPDIR/pkg`. Then to be able to load OpenMath you need to call GAP with the `-l ";MYGAPDIR"` option.

The package comes together with the OpenMath C library developed at INRIA and the program `gpipe` which should be compiled to parse the binary OpenMath format. The compilation should be performed in two stages: first the INRIA library, and then `gpipe`. To do this, change to the package directory `gap4r4/pkg/openmath` and enter the following commands:

    cd OMCv1.3c/src/
    ./configure
    make
    cd ../../
    ./configure ../../
    make

However, it is possible to ignore this step if the binary OpenMath format will not be used.

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