CatColab - formal interoperable conceptual modeling

[kris-brown]

Hi, I think CatColab would be a great addition to this list.

• Description: Platform for interactive scientific and engineering modeling. Designed to allow rigorous compositionality and interoperability between models written in custom DSLs.
• Website, Github
• Project structure: academic
• UX: Text editing like UX
• Target languages: language workbench
• Other:
  • Works in browser
  • It is intended to be used by programmers and non-programmers.

For more details, here are some blog posts (Introduction, version 0.2)

[yairchu]

Hi Kris, if I understand correctly this is an environment for modeling, which is different than programming? What do people use this for? Please ELI5 for folks who aren't necessarily familiar with the domain jargon :)

[kris-brown]

Hi, we've done our best to ELI5 on this page which includes a video of usage!

In summary: people use it kind of like a whiteboard (a very flexible medium where we jointly draw things to reach common understanding), but, unlike a whiteboard, it also has some formal structure that lets us perform mechanized analyses on the thing being collaboratively built.

The current notebook one may be working with is always of a particular kind at any moment time (i.e. a fixed format, like directed graphs, signed directed graphs, petri nets, relational databases). It's important that notebooks have such a form so that the tool can provide a variety of domain-specific analyses ... such analyses wouldn't make sense for any arbitrary thing you could throw on a whiteboard (e.g. looking for positive feedback loops makes sense only for signed graphs, asking a reachability analysis question makes sense for a petri net). Although these notebooks a fixed form, we retain the open-endedness of the whiteboard experience by allowing for fluid movement between these different forms: we may be building a graph together and then realize we want one of our edges to have multiple inputs/outputs, so we can migrate our current (graph) notebook to a petri net notebook.

The mathematical research that underlies the project provides a framework for thinking about these sorts of migrations and how to represent arbitrary kinds of things that you would put on a whiteboard.