Towards the Mathematics Software Bus

The Mathematics Software Bus is a software environment for combining heterogeneous systems performing any kind of mathematical computation. Such an environment will provide combinations of graphics, editing and computation tools through interfaces to already existing powerful software by flexible and powerful semantically integration. Communication and cooperation mechanisms for logical and symbolic computation systems enable to study and solve new classes of problems and to perform efficient computation in mathematics through cooperating specialized packages. We give an overview on the need for cooperation in solving mathematical problems and illustrate the advantages by several well-known examples. The needs and requirements for the Mathematics Software Bus and its architecture are demonstrated through some implementations of powerful interfaces between mathematical services.