Persona Mathematica

Math-Net
PERSONA MATHEMATICA
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Introduction

Standard search

Advanced search

Introduction

The Math-Net service PERSONA MATHEMATICA helps you to find information on people from more than 100 mathematical websites in Germany and Austria. The service was developed and is driven at the moment by the Math-Net group of the Mathematical Institute / University of Cologne. Messages on server errors, bugs and suggestions are welcome.
Probably it is a good idea to learn the handling of the service by the above Interactive Examples (Javascript needed).

The service offers two versions of searching, namely "Standard" and "Advanced". Advanced searching is related to metadata only. For simple name searching the standard method is sufficient and has the advantage of different information sources, which can be chosen.

Best retrieval results, however, are expected to come from Math-Net metadata related to the definition table based on the DublinCore (DC) standard. Unfortunately we do not have enough of those metadata, because of missing data on the mathematical websites, which are gathered by our robot. So we have a problem that can be solved only by the mathematical institutions themselves. Obviously the quality of our service can't be better than the information offered on the sites.

Call for metadata
Math-Net provides a support for generating metadata for personal homepages,

cf. .

Standard Search

The standard retrieval mainly aims to simple name searching . It seems a likely supposition that this covers the greatest part of all user inquiries. Typing significant word beginning characters inside the Name box is sufficient.
The user can choose from different input sources, at the moment

Math-Net metadata (default setting)
Department member list * (default setting)
DMV database [DMV = Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung]
Educational math list * .

The delivered searching results are grouped respectively. Concerning the quality of information pay attention to the following

Nevertheless there is a possibility to combine name searching with two other mask fields named

Fields of interest
Keywords

which are related to metadata only. Observe the boolean settings "and" (default) resp. "or". The corresponding metadata fields are described below.

Advanced Search

The advance method searches metadata only. The form communicates with a SQL database which contains the information gathered by a Harvest system.
The form boxes are nearly as in the standard case (observe "Names" in the place of "Name"), but Queries are more more sophisticated. The relations to metadata fields are

Names
refers to personal Last names. (Dublin Core identifier "DC.Creator.Personalname".)
Fields of interest
refers to research areas and subjects. (Dublin Core identifier "DC.Subject", "DC.Subject.MSC", "DC.Subject.Pacs", "DC.Subject.CR" and "DC.Subject.ZDM".)
Keywords
refers to some other fields (like Email, Postal, Affiliation) and is like a free query. (Dublin Core identifiers "Dc.Creator.PersonalName.Address(Email, Postal, Affiliation and Keywords)".)

A short description of the search syntax , also displayed on the form, is

+word requires word to be in every result

word₁... word_n requires at least one word_i to be in a result.

-word excludes results containing word

where "word,..." are symbolic search expressions. The input is translated to SQL.

If the retrieval does not yield a result, a special proceding (search by sound extension) is automatically started. The algorithm (cf. D.E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol.3 and Soundex) tends to bring together all variants of the same name. The procedure may apparently have some unexpected results, because it retains the first letter of the name, but drops in particular all vowels A, E, I, O, U. At least the problem of searching german umlauts seems to be solved by this method.

Created by   Math-Net Group Köln   - 3/2000


Content		(Javascript needed)
Introduction
Standard search
Advanced search

Introduction
The Math-Net service PERSONA MATHEMATICA helps you to find information on people from more than 100 mathematical websites in Germany and Austria. The service was developed and is driven at the moment by the Math-Net group of the Mathematical Institute / University of Cologne. Messages on server errors, bugs and suggestions are welcome. Probably it is a good idea to learn the handling of the service by the above Interactive Examples (Javascript needed). The service offers two versions of searching, namely "Standard" and "Advanced". Advanced searching is related to metadata only. For simple name searching the standard method is sufficient and has the advantage of different information sources, which can be chosen. Best retrieval results, however, are expected to come from Math-Net metadata related to the definition table based on the DublinCore (DC) standard. Unfortunately we do not have enough of those metadata, because of missing data on the mathematical websites, which are gathered by our robot. So we have a problem that can be solved only by the mathematical institutions themselves. Obviously the quality of our service can't be better than the information offered on the sites. Call for metadata Math-Net provides a support for generating metadata for personal homepages,
cf. .

Standard Search

The standard retrieval mainly aims to simple name searching . It seems a likely supposition that this covers the greatest part of all user inquiries. Typing significant word beginning characters inside the Name box is sufficient. The user can choose from different input sources, at the moment Math-Net metadata (default setting) Department member list * (default setting) DMV database [DMV = Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung] Educational math list * . The delivered searching results are grouped respectively. Concerning the quality of information pay attention to the following Nevertheless there is a possibility to combine name searching with two other mask fields named Fields of interest Keywords which are related to metadata only. Observe the boolean settings "and" (default) resp. "or". The corresponding metadata fields are described below.