Future Directions

We believe that one of the next important steps in the evolution of internet accessible mathematical services will be for a computer algebra system not only to generate HTTP requests but also to receive answers and convert them into its native representation for further processing by the user without the mediation of a web browser. The fact that an internet service is in use would be rendered transparent to the naive user.

An excellent candidate for such an internet service is the highly non portable Tübingen Parallel Gröbner Bases service. We hope that soon a Maple (or Mathematica or GAP) user will be able to compute a Gröbner basis on the Tübingen server with a single Maple command obtaining an answer in seconds to a problem which might otherwise have taken hours on their desktop.