  Mathematical formulae carry complex and essential semantic information in a
variety of formats. Accessing this information with different systems requires
a standardized machine-readable format that is capable of encoding
presentational and semantic information. Even though MathML is an official
recommendation by W3C and an ISO standard for representing mathematical
expressions, we could identify only very few systems which use the full
descriptiveness of MathML. MathML's high complexity results in a steep learning
curve for novice users. We hypothesize that this complexity is the reason why
many community-driven projects refrain from using MathML, and instead develop
problem-specific data formats for their purposes. We provide a user-friendly,
open-source application programming interface for controlling MathML data. Our
API is written in JAVA and allows to create, manipulate, and efficiently access
commonly needed information in presentation and content MathML. Our interface
also provides tools for calculating differences and similarities between MathML
expressions. The API also allows to determine the distance between expressions
using different similarity measures. In addition, we provide adapters for
numerous conversion tools and the canonicalization project. Our toolkit
facilitates processing of mathematics for digital libraries, without the need
to obtain XML expertise.
