Re: rdf and category theory

On 9 Apr 2014, at 17:22, David Spivak <dspivak@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Yes: a couple years ago, Eric and I had several nice discussions about RDF, SPARQL, and their relation to a certain category-theoretic foundation of databases. 
> 
> I wrote a paper that benefited greatly from these discussions. It is linked and attached.
> 
> Let me know if it's of interest, or if I can be of further assistance.

Thanks a lot. I need to get better at category theory before I can read that paper, but it's good to know 
there is something I'll be able to use this knowledge for.

Currently I am more than half way the very introductory book "Conceptual Mathematics: A first introduction to categories", Second Edition, by F. William Lawvere and Stephen H. Schanuel.

I have "Category Theory" second edition by Steve Awodey on my desk here, though it is much more advanced.

Someone online tweeted your course at MIT on Category Theory for Scientists
   http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp13/
( Is MIT not recording your talk as part of a MOOC?  That would be nice :-)

Alexandre Bertails library banana-rdf [1[ does is based on the notion of catamorphism [2]. Perhaps
Alex has a few more pointers too.

Henry

PS. is there a list somewhere which is likely to have more people knowledgeable in this space to post to? semantic-web
may just be a bit to general a list for this.


[1] https://github.com/w3c/banana-rdf
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamorphism


> 
> David
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Jean-Marc Vanel <jeanmarc.vanel@gmail.com> wrote:
> A search 
> category theory  prove "rdf"
> 
> gives this,
> which seems in the same direction as Eric mentioned:
> 
> Proceedings of the
> Seventh International Workshop on
> Graph Transformation and Visual Modeling Techniques
> (GT-VMT 2008)
> Graph Transformations for the
> Resource Description Framework
> Benjamin Braatz and Christoph Brandt
> 
> This search gives other interesting stuff :
> "category theory" inference "rdf"
> 
> 
> 
> 2014-04-09 13:10 GMT+02:00 Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org>:
> 
> * henry.story@bblfish.net <henry.story@bblfish.net> [2014-04-09 12:49+0200]
> > I am reading up on category theory, which is very important in functional
> > programming languages. Does anyone have some insight on what the relations
> > between the two are? Do people use category theory to prove things in rdf
> > or vice versa?
> 
> David Spivak and I looked at using category theory to back the query
> rewriting algorithms in SWObjects. The notion was to treat query
> rewrite as morphisms between different schemas. I don't recall how far
> we got. David?
> 
> 
> > Henry
> >
> > Social Web Architect
> > http://bblfish.net/
> >
> >
> 
> --
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> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jean-Marc Vanel
> Déductions SARL - Consulting, services, training,
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