  We introduce the Declaratron, a system which takes a declarative approach to
specifying mathematically based scientific computation. This uses displayable
mathematical notation (Content MathML) and is both executable and semantically
well defined. We combine domain specific representations of physical science
(e.g. CML, Chemical Markup Language), MathML formulae and computational
specifications (DeXML) to create executable documents which include scientific
data and mathematical formulae. These documents preserve the provenance of the
data used, and build tight semantic links between components of mathematical
formulae and domain objects---in effect grounding the mathematical semantics in
the scientific domain. The Declaratron takes these specifications and i)
carries out entity resolution and decoration to prepare for computation ii)
uses a MathML execution engine to run calculations over the revised tree iii)
outputs domain objects and the complete document to give both results and an
encapsulated history of the computation. A short description of a case study is
given to illustrate how the system can be used. Many scientific problems
require frequent change of the mathematical functional form and the Declaratron
provides this without requiring changes to code. Additionally, it supports
reproducible science, machine indexing and semantic search of computations,
makes implicit assumptions visible, and separates domain knowledge from
computational techniques. We believe that the Declaratron could replace much
conventional procedural code in science.
