The project was set up as a Community Project under the same terms as Free Software Projects are developed. It lives from the efforts and contributions of all interested parties and invites all people actively to contribute to it.
See the Overview for a more detailed record of the motivation, the main ideas, the history and current state of the SymbolicData Project.
We manage to acknowledge contributions assigning data to the people who contributed them both for honour and responsibility. For this purpose contributors have to register. The best way to contribute is to join the project team and to help manage the data. It would be a real bottleneck if this burden is taken by a small number of people only.
In a world of growing importance of intellectual property rights it is unavoidable to think about copyright issues of a project as SymbolicData. We decided to consider the SymbolicData collection as a big "book" with common authorship (in the sense of, e.g., § 8 of the German UrhG) that should be freely available in digital form to all interested parties and that we are allowed to rearrange according to the decisions and latest technical achievements without further notice by the current and future project team.
Authors retain the copyright on their contributions but give an unrevocable nonexclusive right to use their contributions for the described purposes, i.e., the material can be modified, rearranged, produced derived work from it by the project team and any interested party. For benefit the contributors have free access - on the same rights as any community member - to the current version of the tools and data.
All these goals are best achieved with the regulations of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). This means that people all over the world can freely download and use the data under these terms and any derived work has to be given back to the community under the same terms.
But this also means that contributors have to accept those terms as inavoidable for a contribution. If you contribute to SymbolicData we silently assume that you accept to give an unrevocable nonexclusive right to use your contribution under the terms of the GNU GPL and that you are allowed to grant such rights. In particular this means, that you cannot publish the same contribution giving exclusive rights to a publisher. Nowadays, most of the publishers understand such a position.
Nevertheless, for sake of integrity of our data base we urgently ask you to refrain from contributing to SymbolicData if you are not willing or not able to meet these terms.
The following table acknowledges the contributions of different people to the project.
| Name | Location | Contribution | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Francesca Cioffi | Univ. di Napoli, Italy | Data: INTPS/Curves | |
| Hans-Gert Graebe | Univ. Leipzig, Germany |
Perl tools: basic modules, Meta, BIB, References, Syntax, SQL, GEO Data: BIB, INTPS, GEO | joined: 3/1999 active |
| Hans Schoenemann | Univ. Kaiserslautern, Germany | Perl tools: Compute, Adaption of GNU time | |
| Jean-Charles Faugere | Univ. Paris VI, France | Data: INTPS | |
| Michael Dengel | Univ. Kaiserslautern, Germany | Perl tools: Html presentation, frames and JavaScript | joined:
10/1999 left: 9/2000 |
| Olaf Bachmann | Univ. Kaiserslautern, Germany |
Perl tools: basic modules, Data, Record, INTPS, Html, Compute
environment Data: BIB, INTPS, Benchmark runs | joined:
3/1999 left: 12/2000 |
| Raymond Hemmecke | TU Magdeburg, Germany | Data: TESTSETS | joined: 2/2002 active |
| Malte Witte | Univ. Leipzig, Germany | Data: GEO/Chou | joined: 3/2000 left: 3/2001 |
We partly used material earlier compiled by Ralf Hemmecke (Univ. Leipzig, now RISC Linz).
The project is currently maintained by Hans-Gert Gräbe (University of Leipzig, Germany)
The project is supported by the German Fachgruppe Computeralgebra - a common organisation of the DMV, GAMM, and GI - that sponsors the www.SymbolicData.org domain. We also acknowledge earlier support from the UMS Medicis Project at CNRS and l'Ecole Polytechnique Paris.