Re: [Axiom-developer] [sage-devel] Multiple databases and sage

[daly]

On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 10:44 +0200, Paul-Olivier Dehaye wrote:
> 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.

Axiom is based on a Category concept. Categories give a mathematical
structure to the results that make it possible to use the algebra
as a scaffold to organize the software. It has proven to be very
effective.

Can you point me at the sage-combinat project?

Tim Daly