Dear all, I am currently participating in a sage-based project that aims to integrate a lot of number theory databases (some of you know it, or are even participating!). Some of the goals of the project are to display, search across or perform further computations on archived objects that come from very different sources. The variety of sources can be due to human factors (more than one person has data, or people have overlapping but not identical interest), historical reasons (a legacy table has since been expanded but should be kept for compatibility reasons), and most importantly mathematical reasons (the archived objects can be computed using very different constructions that current mathematical results do not know how to unify, but all these objects should really be looked at through the same lens sometimes).
I expect these to be very common problems when trying to integrate mathematical data from various sources into sage, regardless of the area of mathematics. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Some participants of the sage-combinat project are pushing for the concept of "Categories" (<> mathematical categories) as a way to exploit object-oriented programming to its fullest and organize code in a flexible and efficient way. "Categories" are then used to incorporate purely mathematical information (of the type "a Field is a Ring"), that Python can also understand and use to build a whole class hierarchy. I think that similarly the problems I have described in the first paragraph could be partly solved from a new concept of "MathematicalDatabases", as a way to exploit object-oriented programming to its fullest and organize _data_ in a flexible and efficient way. Any thoughts on that? Thanks Paul -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
