undergraduate maths project on categorical databases

[Simon Willerton]

Hi,

I was thinking of proposing an undergraduate project in which a student would do something like read the first three chapters of Seven Sketches and then try to do something with CQL.  Does anyone have any ideas as to whether this might be viable or have any other suggestions?

The student would be a mathematics student not a computer science student.  They would likely have some experience programming in Python, but possibly nothing more (although the project might attract someone with a bit of mySQL experience).  At a quick glance the tutorials on CQL look like they have might have certain prerequisites in terms of computer science knowledge, but maybe they just look like that!

Any thoughts or ideas appreciated.

Cheers,

Simon.

[Ryan Wisnesky]

I think that is a very viable idea, and one that a few people have done with David's CT for the Sciences book. The biggest issue from a pedagogical standpoint is that the computational category theory implemented for CQL is only a fraction of the CT universe, and of course it is tailored for data integration purposes, so words such as "entity" and "foreign key" are used in place of "object" and "generating morphism". But CQL is a pretty thin veneer over co-pre-sheaves and change of basis functors.

We created a number of predecessors to CQL while we explored its design space; some of these, in particular "FQL++" have a different set of operations; for example, it can express monads on Set, which CQL cannot. Those (non-industrial strength) languages are archived here: https://github.com/CategoricalData/FQL.

Ryan

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