On 6/4/2011 4:55 PM, nathaniel@tierblend.org wrote:
Hi: I would like to submit a library which would allow functionality related to scale and granularity to be performed on STL-like containers. Until recently I was in a doctoral program specializing in the philosophy of science, and I am especially interested in multiscale data modeling and its applications to e.g. GUI design, code generation, decision procedures, and DSL implementation. For example, one of my projects involves a DSL implemented through multiscale graphs in lieu of conventional syntax trees. I used to study at Buffalo, which houses the National Center for Ontological Research -- headed by the quite broad-ranging scholar Barry Smith -- and has done pioneering work in biomedical ontology and also in ontological models related to complex or "vague" aggregative structures. In these structures collections of objects of some base type T can be defined as aggregates but with varying degrees of looseness or "individual coherence"; and this aggregation can be iterated to produce multiscaled structures which can be queried or represented at different granularities. There are a number of analytic procedures which can be implemented on such structures, some overlapping with graph theoretic or statistical methods. These structures also possess alot of internal structure above and beyond their underlying list of values, so they are suited to memory-optimized C++ code rather than higher-level languages like Java. However, I am not aware of generic libraries which really incorporate these kind of data structures and their analysis in a systematic way, although I have come across non-template libraries which implement some similar features. What I propose is a library which could be used in a fashion similar to std::vector or std::set but which support additional functions along the lines of, e.g., building multigraphs out of T-type nodes; partitions of T-sets with functions to define or measure e.g. intrapartition relevance; defining (or extending) a scale metric on T-objects, T-sets, T-arrays, or other "T- data structures" and using it for rescaling, scale-filter, and other scale-related transformations; defining iterators or "walks" on T-collections which take scale and granularity into account; etc. In a number of cases the algorithms for these kinds of operations have been described in theoretical form or even already implemented in languages like Scheme.
You generally need to define "scale" and "granularity" in mathematical terms for computer programmers, else you are just interesting scientists in our particular area. Also would it not be possible to create a class which consists of an STL container and some other objects which represent "scale" and "granularity" and add the necessary functionality to that class rather than attempting to re-engineer some STL container ?