Usability Engineering
Literate proving: presenting and documenting formal proofs
MKM'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mathematical Knowledge Management
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Hierarchical proof presentations are ubiquitous within logic and computer science, but have made little impact on mathematics in general. The reasons for this are not currently known, and need to be understood if mathematical knowledge management systems are to gain acceptance in the mathematical community. We report on some initial experiments with three users of a set of web-based hierarchical proofs, which suggest that usability problems could be a factor. In order to better understand these problems we present a theoretical analysis of hierarchical proofs using Cognitive Dimensions [6]. The analysis allows us to formulate some concrete hypotheses about the usability of hierarchical proof presentations.