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A Networked World (Part 2) | Azimuth

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In 2007, I asked myself: as mathematically as possible, what can formally ground meaningful information, including both its successful communication and its role in decision-making? I believed that category theory could be useful in formalizing the type of object that we call information, and the type of relationship that we call communication. Over the next few years, I worked on this project. I tried to understand what information is, how it is stored, and how it can be transferred between entities that think differently. Since databases store information, I wanted to understand databases category-theoretically. I eventually decided that databases are basically just categories corresponding to a collection of meaningful concepts and connections between them, and that these categories are equipped with functors Such a functor assigns to each meaningful concept a set of examples and connects them as dictated by the morphisms of I later found out that this “databases as categories” i

A Networked World (Part 2) | Azimuth Azimuth Home About A Networked World (Part 2) guest post by David Spivak • Part 1: The problem . Creating a knowledge network In 2007, I asked myself: as mathematically as possible, what can formally ground meaningful information, including both its successful communication and its role in decision-making? I believed that category theory could be useful in formalizing the type of object that we call information, and the type of relationship that we call communication. Over the next few years, I worked on this project. I tried to understand what informa

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