Introduction

In the issue 9:1 Corner I discussed various aspects of the Wolfram Functions site. I explained its organization, gave examples of identities, and showed sneak previews of the graphics gallery, which has since been added. Within an NSF grant with the Grainger Engineering Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and MathWorld Oleg Marichev, John Renze, Chris Williamson, Andy Hunt, and I worked on various enhancements to the site over the last year. The new components are interactive plotting, the calculation of function values, and a mathematical search engine. In this Corner, I will discuss some of the implementation issues of the mathematical search. Contrary to my other Corners, this one will contain virtually no Mathematica code or graphics, but mostly text. Because this is the first operational semantic search engine on the World Wide Web, I believe a look behind the working mechanisms and a bird's eye view of the search strategy will be more interesting to most users than a variety of code snippets. Of course, the preparation of the data, as well as the individual mathematical searches, are realized through Mathematica programs.