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

The production deployment, tracking the latest release, is available at https://catcolab.org. For more about the project and where it's going, see the help page and our blog posts about the releases so far:

• v0.1: Hummingbird
• v0.2: Wren

Warning

CatColab is under active development with new features added regularly. We aim to preserve the integrity of your data but you should not store anything critical or sensitive.

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 Rust (say by using rustup) and install pnpm, or use the dev container.

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. For other options, see the frontend README.

Backend development

Developing the backend locally requires more setup. See the instructions in the backend README.

Formatting and linting

To maintain a clean and consistent codebase, we follow strict conventions on code formatting and style. To format and lint the frontend code, run these commands:

cd packages/frontend
pnpm run format
pnpm run lint

To format and lint the Rust code, run these commands:

cargo fmt
cargo clippy

Try to remember to run these commands before making a PR. (If you forget, the CI will remind you.)

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.