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CatColab

CatColab (working name) is a collaborative environment for formal, interoperable, conceptual modeling.

Elaborating on these keywords, CatColab aims to be:

  • Formal: Models created in the system, be they qualitative or quantitative, are well-defined mathematical objects that can be critiqued with clarity.
  • Interoperable: Models, and the logics in which they are expressed, can be flexibly interoperated with each other, without privileging any viewpoint as primary.
  • Conceptual: Each domain-specific logic in the system is well adapted to the concepts used by practitioners in that domain.
  • Modeling: Constructing a model is a collaborative, ongoing process that does not required participants to have specialized technical expertise.

For users

An early demo is available at https://catcolab.org. For more about where the project is going, try this blog post.

Warning

CatColab is a pre-alpha software under active development. You are welcome to experiment but you should not store any important or sensitive data in the system.

For developers

The staging deployment, synced to the main branch, is available at https://next.catcolab.org. Documentation for developers is browsable at https://next.catcolab.org/dev/.

CatColab is written in a mix of Rust and TypeScript. To start developing, install install Rust (say by using rustup) and install pnpm, or use the dev container (see below).

Frontend development

To develop the frontend locally, clone the repository and run

> pnpm install
> pnpm run build
> pnpm run dev --mode staging

Then navigate your browser to the URL provided by Vite.

Note that the flag --mode staging uses the staging deployment of the backend. When this flag is omitted, the command pnpm run dev uses a local backend.

Using the Dev Container

CatColab has experimental support for development using a dev container, which simplifies the setup process by providing a pre-configured environment via a Dockerfile. This is most useful for developers using Visual Studio Code or other editors that support the dev containers standard.

To use the dev container:

  1. Ensure you have a container runtime installed and running on your machine. You can refer to the Open Container Initiative for more information on container standards and runtimes. For practical guidance, you might consider starting with Docker's Get Started Guide.
  2. Open the CatColab repository in VS Code.
  3. Open the VS Code command pallet by pressing Cmd+Shift+P on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+P on Linux
  4. Issue the command "Dev Containers: Reopen in Container".
  5. Once the container is running, the necessary setup commands will be executed automatically.
  6. VS Code will prompt "Your application running on port 5173 is available. See all forwarded ports". Click the link to open the application in your browser.

For mathematicians

As the name suggests, CatColab is based on mathematical ideas from category theory. It is a specific design goal that the system be usable without any knowledge of such ideas. Still, for those curious about the underlying mathematics, here are a few pointers for further reading.

CatColab is an editor for categorical structures and their morphisms and higher morphisms. The meta-logical framework organizing these categorical structures is based on double category theory. More precisely, the domain-specific logics in CatColab are defined by double theories, and the models in CatColab are models of double theories.

The library of domain-specific logics in CatColab, available now and to grow over time, is inspired by a wide body of research in applied category theory and beyond. Incomplete bibliographies are in the dev docs and the core docs.