The Understanding and Structure Analyzing for Online Handwritten Chemical Formulas

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for understanding and analyzing the online handwritten chemical formulas. With the structural characteristics, semantic rules, and more importantly grammatical rules, the analyzing process is divided into 3 levels: formula level, molecule level, and text level. A formal description of the chemical formula based-on the grammatical rules is summed up and applied to the analyzing process which generates grammar spanning graphs from the analyzed result step-by-step, and that is used for the further structure representation and data retrieval. Our work, as an important component of applying mobile computing research in education, is proved effective and promising.