Universal abstraction

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The core essence of universal abstraction is expanding your scope of awareness to encompass as much content as possible, for the purpose of being able to do more with less. Simplicity allows for automation and scalability.

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Category Theory

Category Theory[1] is the foundational reasoning mechanism to represent and infer decisions from data. It provides mathematics a universally grounded notation and encoding standard. It is a formal language based on one type of symbol, and one symbol type only, the arrow, or hyperlink.

Wiki's Hyperlink in two directions

MediaWiki has two types of built-in hyperlink syntax. One is the curly braces {{}} and the other one is square brackets []. One can think of curly braces being the hyperlink for pulling' information, and square brackets being the hyperlink for pushing information[2]. The notion of pulling comes from that fact that this annotated link will trigger a computing procedure in MediaWiki to produce some content and to be pulled into the location where the curly braces ({{}}), shows up in the page. The notion of pushing comes from that fact that this annotated link in the page where the square brackets ([]) can be pushed by a mouse button, and lead user to another page.

Pulling with Magic Words

The pulling navigation feature is accomplished by using the curly brackets, often known as Magic Words[3]. All types of commands that are intended to pull in or alter the object page are found inside these brackets. For example, if you want to display the current time, you can use this statement {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}}, and it should be rendered as:

{{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}} to be rendered as: 20241201002233

The simplest and most common method of pulling information is known as transclusion, which simply means to pull information from one page to another, created a fixed relationship between the two pages.

Typically Template pages are specifically designed for transclusion purposes, but its not limited to templates, any and all pages within Mediawiki are able to be transcluded, unless specifically restricted. In order to transclude a page simply follow the command below.

{{page name}}

In-line queries are another powerful tool for using pulling commands. Typically in-line queries are either an #ask or a #show request.

Ask queries allow you to dynamically pull data and display it in the form of graphs, charts and tables under certain defined parameters. In order to query data it must be defined by either categories or properties, since it’s these tagging methods that allow data to be machine readable; therefore we recommend that as much as possible you keep content stored on category pages, which is the basic manager of page level data abstractions, and then for content stored within category pages as much as possible limit yourself to only using properties to input any value into the pages. By limiting yourself to only categories and properties you will ensure that your database is lean and most importantly machine readable.

{{#Ask}}

Show queries are a form of transclusion; while transclusion typically deals with content on the page level of data abstraction, #Show queries deal with transclusion on the value level of abstraction. Therefore if you would simply like to pull a specific value input from one page to another #show is an ideal candidate.

{{#Show}}

Pushing with Internal and External Links

The pushing navigation feature is accomplished by using square brackets. All types of commands that are intended to push you out of a page are found inside these brackets. When pushing to a page outside the same domain you use one set of brackets and simply input the url inside the brackets, to push to pages within the same domain, or pages found in wikipedia, you use two sets of brackets and simply input the page name.

[[Property name::Property value]] = [[predicate::subject]]

Properties can assign varying datatypes

[[Category:page name]] = [[hierarchy:classification]]

General Hyperlink Usage

When simply ordering and building the database you will create pushing hyperlink relationships, following an adding directional flow in the form of categories, and properties. If you want to compute or compile information then you will create pulling hyperlink relationships in the form of transclusion, magicwords, pasarfunctions, or other special commands.

Understanding this simple and fundamental use of mediawiki features is what allows this tool to be a perfect candidate for demonstrating Category Theory's ordering and computation methods.

References

  1. William Lawvere, Stephen Schanuel, Conceptual Mathematics: A first introduction to categories, 2nd Edition, Cambridge Press, 2009
  2. This idea is due to Jared Cordon's observation in a conversation with Ben Koo on June 23, 2021, last viewed:20241201002233
  3. Please refer to MediaWiki.org Website:Magic Words