Wolfram's Computational Document Format

Wolfram, makers of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, unveiled a new set of tools today for embedding mathematical formulas and charts into documents--formulas and charts that the reader can edit and play with. With these tools, Wolfram takes a leap into the modern interactive publishing and educational market. You can create a document that contains a chart, say, about the current relationship between publishing ad revenues and subscriptions, but let the reader carry out experiments such as "Suppose we accelerate the trend in subscriptions a little bit..." Simply by dragging a line on a chart, the reader can cause the graph to recalculate relationships according to an underlying formula. Wolfram calls the output the Computable Document Format.

Wolfram's tools create documents that can be shared on the Web, and are free for use by people who publish free documents. The tools can be licensed by organizations that charge for documents. Access to the tools can be on the Wolfram site (Software as a Service), or licensed and installed on your own server.