The guide to available mathematical software problem classification system1

A vast collection of reusable mathematical and statistical software is now available for use by scientists and engineers in their modeling efforts. This software represents a significant source of mathematical expertise, created and maintained at considerable expense. Unfortunately, the collection is so heterogeneous that it is a tedious and error-prone task simply to determine what software is available to solve a given problem. In mathematical problem solving environments of the future such questions will be fielded by expert software advisory systems. One way for such systems to systematically associate available software with the problems they solve is to use a problem classification system. In this paper we describe a detailed tree-structured problem-oriented classification system appropriate for such use.