Re: Category Theory and Databases

[categories <cat-dist@mta.ca>]

Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 20:35:22 +0000
From: Zinovy Diskin <diskin@fis.lv>

There are a few papers written by mathematicians, they are rather far 
from the hot DB problems. There are several papers written by DB 
theorists, CT is used there as a kind of decoration rather than 
essentially. There are a few works where CT is really employed for
solving real DB problems.

In summer of 1994 Boris Kadish and I wrote a declarative text called 
"Algberaic Graph-Oriented = Category-Theory-Based:
    Manifesto of categorizing database theory "
(its last updated version  can be found on ftp:
//ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/diskin/mnfst4.*   ),
in which there is a  list of about 30 titles on CT & DB.
The manifesto and other our papers on CT & DB are oriented mainly on DB 
people but can be of some interest for CT people as well. The 
machinery we use is a generalization of Makkai's sketches.

My last effort in the direction "CT for DB"  is the paper "Variable set semantics 
for generalized sketches: Why ER is more object-oriented than OO"
(on ftp: //ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/diskin/ERvsOO.* )
submitted to  'Data & Knowledge Engineering'.

Zinovy Diskin