Not signed in (Sign In)

Not signed in

Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below

  • Sign in using OpenID

Discussion Tag Cloud

Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

Welcome to nForum
If you want to take part in these discussions either sign in now (if you have an account), apply for one now (if you don't).
    • CommentRowNumber1.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 1st 2012
    Hi,

    does anybody know a “fact sheet” of the most usual categories? A big table where you could look up “what are the regular epimorphisms in XY and are they the same in the supcategory AB?“ etc.

    Regards
    The User
    • CommentRowNumber2.
    • CommentAuthorFinnLawler
    • CommentTimeJun 1st 2012

    Something like this is in appendix B of the notes that Zoran linked to a while ago.

    • CommentRowNumber3.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJun 1st 2012
    • CommentRowNumber4.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 1st 2012
    • (edited Jun 1st 2012)

    Anybody interested in a bit more flexible database (I think handling big tables in the instiki would get really cumbersome)? With some software support it would be easier to handle bunches of categories. I created a prototype (ugly design, without any links, grouping of properties&categories would be nice).

    From the database page: “I remember someone at nLab could write the database in Ruby, is this offer still on?” So there were plans to do something like this?

    PS: Okay, I have found this, well, there has not been a real result (regarding semantic wiki: that would probably be the best, but would require some complex software).

    • CommentRowNumber5.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    • (edited Jun 2nd 2012)

    I know such a database: it’s called the nnLab! When I need to know what the regular epimorphisms in Category Abc are are I go to Google and type

    nLab "regular epimorphism" Abc
    

    That gives me all that the nnLab database already has on this. Sometimes I get the information that I need this way. Sometimes not. If not, I collect it elsewhere or work it out myself or something, and then add it to the nnLab, so that I have it next time that I need it.

    • CommentRowNumber6.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012

    Hehe, yes, I already noticed that: Some consider structured data useless, some don’t. Well, personally I will slowly put some stuff in there, because I would like to get some overview, but of course, for most cases the nLab is much more appropriate (thanks for your awesome work, btw ;)). But if anybody is interested, let me know.

    • CommentRowNumber7.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012

    The nnLab is probably “unstructured data” in the technical sense, but is it unstructured in the sense that you would acually need in practice? My impression is the opposite:

    if in practice you need to know about which properties are shared by which category, a rigidly structured database that works like a telephone book will not be so useful. The most useful thing will be a search engine that to the keywords which you believe are related to what you are looking for spits out all the information that looks relevant. This is precisely what you get with nnLab+Google.

    (I had said something similar already last time that somebody started to built a “database of categories” here: to be really useful it needs to be very flexible.)

    The main disadvantage of the nnLab as a database currently is that – despite all the effort – it is still lacking so much information. But this is a problem that will be much much worse if you try to single-handedly build a database from scratch. If you really need something with lots of pulldown-menus etc., I’d suggest that the way to go would be to program it as an overlay for the nnLab, something that harvests its information by doing keyword searches on the nnLab.

    • CommentRowNumber8.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012

    Well, I do not claim to build anything “complete”, and yes, RDF would be more flexible. “harvesting information by doing keyword searches”? How do you think should that be possible, nLab mainly consists of running text, it would require advanced computational understanding of the English language, which is far beyond the state of the art.

    • CommentRowNumber9.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    • (edited Jun 2nd 2012)

    “harvesting information by doing keyword searches”? How do you think should that be possible, nLab mainly consists of running text,

    I could ask back: how would a database of categories be useful that does not have this running text, by and large? I don’t see how there can be a useful dataset of categories that works just like a phone book.

    The matter in question is just too complex for that. After all, a “database of categories” is pretty much a “database of mathematics”. Everything in math lives in one category or other.

    What I can imagine as being useful is an overlay to the nLab, which maybe looks like a database to the user, if that’s desireable, that offers useful menus and checkboxes, then has some ideas about how to do gratifying searches for what seems to be the information requested, and then produces pointers to the subsections of nnLab entries that have this information – maybe displayed in subwindows as GoogleBooks does it. Something like this. I am pretty sure that this would be useful, especially as the nnLab grows.

    • CommentRowNumber10.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    • (edited Jun 2nd 2012)

    I totally agree with you that some datasets for itself, without references to real mathematical explanations, are worthless, but I think some way to access information systematically, too, would be useful.

    “I am pretty sure that this would be useful, especially as the nLab grows.”

    Yes, I think so, too. But somewhere the information has to be stored, automatic extraction is really, really unrealistic (there is a project extracting information from Wikipedia infoboxes, even that is challenging). What do you think, how it should be stored?

    • CommentRowNumber11.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    • (edited Jun 2nd 2012)

    But somewhere the information has to be stored, automatic extraction is really, really unrealistic (there is a project extracting information from Wikipedia infoboxes, even that is challenging). What do you think, how it should be stored?

    We have on the nnLab the wiki-category called “category: category”. This labels those pages that discuss a specific category.

    One thing one could do is start adding to these pages a standardized template of Properties-subsections, such as

    ## Definition
     {#Definition}
    
      Definition. The category $C$ has as objects ... and as morphisms ...
    
    ## Properties
      ### Monos and epis
       {#MonosAndEpis}
    
         Theorem. A monomorphism in $C$ is a morphism such that... An epimorphism is a morphism such that... 
    
          Proof. ...
    
      ### Limits and colimits
       {#LimitsAndColimits}
    
         Theorem. Limits in $C$ are computed by... 
    
          Proof. ...
    

    And so forth. This would provide information in a way that is all of: robust, human readable, equipped with relevant background information, indexable by machines.

    To some extent we have been doing this anyway. But we never agreed on a fully standardized formatting/labelling. We could just do that. Then you or others could – I suppose – easily write software that searches the nnLab for these standardized section headers / section labels.

    The big advantage that I see is that we don’t duplicate effort too much, with some people storing information in a wiki, others storing the same kind of information in some other database. There are not that many people who do that anyway. We should make sure that they benefit from each other’s efforts, and not duplicate them.

    What do you think?

    • CommentRowNumber12.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    {#something} is an anchor?

    Well, I doubt that a fixed format is suitable for nice to read articles. Sometimes it is appropriate to mention something as a side-notice, sometimes it is not even worth to mention it, but it would be good, if you could search for it. (do you want to have a section about regular monomorphisms in $\mathbf{Set}$?) And of course some diversity makes texts easier to read. What would be about adding some annotation using comments? (like <!-- -->, but it seems not to work in nLab? like “the regular monomorphism are <!--#Reg-Mono-->[…]<!--#/Reg-Mono-->”) Or what would be about creating a subpage for category-articles containing structured data? (like nLab/show/Top/data) It would not be too far away and could benefit from instiki's history.
    • CommentRowNumber13.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    • (edited Jun 2nd 2012)

    {#something} is an anchor?

    Yes. It seems to serve as an identification just as well as

    <!--#something-->[…]<!--#/something-->.
    
    • CommentRowNumber14.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
    Would you mind if I would create a copy of Set or something like that in e.g. Sandbox/Set to play around with some inline annotations and to explore what could be done? Btw. you can use {: } for comments, <!-- --> seems not to work.
    • CommentRowNumber15.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012

    I wouldn’t mind at all. You can try the Sandbox, but I suppose for most purposes you could just as well work in the relevant entry itself.

    Thanks for looking into this! I believe if we can settle on a good general scheme for “indexing” material in nnLab entries in a standardized way, that would eventually be quite useful.

    • CommentRowNumber16.
    • CommentAuthorTobyBartels
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2012

    You are welcome to use the Sandbox or to create Sandbox/Set to avoid interruptions from other people. Of course you can also use Set itself when you have something that you like.

    • CommentRowNumber17.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 13th 2012
    Hi,

    I have continued with it and now it can read data from nLab such that all the data can be stored and modified in the nLab. I have put some data into Set and Top and it gets extracted (I have to tell it manually to update it, then it checks all the pages in the wiki category of categories).

    Current status:
    I have used the Markdown-metadata extension, for example:
    {:data
    key=Set
    desc="Category of sets with functions as morphisms"
    name="\(\mathbf{Set\}\)"
    }

    As proposed in the metadata-proposal you have to escape closing braces (“\}”) inside the metadata section. Alternative syntax:
    The category is {:yes} complete{:}. However, it is not {:no} co-complete{:}.

    The monomorphisms are the {:Mono} injections{:}.

    The properties which can be used are defined in Metadata properties. Every property can have a key, a description and a URL.

    The extractor looks where the metadata gets declared in page and creates a link to the nearest section/anchor. Except of metadata at the end of the page (since it is not connected with any text). An additional small feature: for example for Set you do not have to specify reg-mono, ext-epi etc., since every epimorphism is a retraction the remaining entries are obvious and get filled out by the software (in that case bimorphisms are of course isomorphisms).

    What would be next? There should be some kind of a design, categorisation of categories and properties to make it more comprehensible and the extractor should be less pedantic when there are links or additional hyphens, spaces or upper/lowercase letters.

    Any concerns or comments?
    • CommentRowNumber18.
    • CommentAuthorTobyBartels
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2012

    It’s not exactly integrated with the text, but at least it gives people a place to put the data that your extractor can use.

    • CommentRowNumber19.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2012

    The User, thanks for taking the initiative on this! Do you have a name? Around here we usually use our real names… and “The User” is a more than usually uninformative handle. (-:

    I think metadata is an excellent choice for how to store this sort of information. As you mentioned above, I have advocated before for a semantic-wiki style approach to this sort of thing, and this seems fairly similar. I actually prefer that exhaustive data of this form not necessarily be in the main text of the page; I prefer that pages don’t get bloated unnecessarily. A very long page with lots of lists of information is often less useful to me, as it is overwhelming and hard to find things in, than a shorter one which mentions only the most important facts with references to where other facts can be found.

    Can I ask that we make the names of the properties be more descriptive? I realize that they have descriptions at Metadata properties but I think the names could stand to be more descriptive and memorable as well. Perhaps they could also adhere to the general nLab convention of lowercase names, and omitting unnecessary hyphens (eg. “coproducts” rather than “Co-Products”).

    Also, is there any way that the table at Metadata properties could be made human-readable as-is, without needing to view the source?

    • CommentRowNumber20.
    • CommentAuthorThe User
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2012
    “Do you have a name?”—I suspect me of having one. ;-) You may call me Jonathan.

    Yes, “coproducts” etc. seems to be the standard here, I will change that. Regarding special kinds of morphisms: I tried to mimic the symbols used by some people to denote the classes of those morphisms, like Epi or Ext-Epi or ExtrEpi. Do you use anything like that in the nLab? You would prefer whole words or “monomorph” or…? Regarding the Metadata properties: The current syntactic structure is just the result of a quick and dirty approach to implement that, should be changed anyway.
    • CommentRowNumber21.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJun 14th 2012

    I would probably lean towards using whole words like “extremal epimorphisms” (or “extremal-epimorphisms” or “extremal_epimorphisms” if spaces are a problem), or maybe the shorter “extremal epis”. Anyone else have an opinion?