Deduction as Reduction

Deduction systems and graph rewriting systems are compared within a common categorical framework. This leads to an improved deduction method in diagrammatic logics

Transformation of Attributed Structures with Cloning (Long Version)

Copying, or cloning, is a basic operation used in the specification of many applications in computer science. However, when dealing with complex structures, like graphs, cloning is not a straightforward operation since a copy of a single vertex may involve (implicitly)copying many edges. Therefore, most graph transformation approaches forbid the possibility of cloning. We tackle this problem by providing a framework for graph transformations with cloning. We use attributed graphs and allow rules to change attributes. These two features (cloning/changing attributes) together give rise to a powerful formal specification approach. In order to handle different kinds of graphs and attributes, we first define the notion of attributed structures in an abstract way. Then we generalise the sesqui-pushout approach of graph transformation in the proposed general framework and give appropriate conditions under which attributed structures can be transformed. Finally, we instantiate our general framework with different examples, showing that many structures can be handled and that the proposed framework allows one to specify complex operations in a natural way

Categorical Abstract Rewriting Systems and Functoriality of Graph Transformation

Rewriting systems are often defined as binary relations over a given set of objects. This simple definition is used to describe various properties of rewriting such as termination, confluence, normal forms etc. In this paper, we introduce a new notion of abstract rewriting in the framework of categories. Then, we define the functoriality property of rewriting systems. This property is sometimes called vertical composition. We show that most of graph transformation systems are functorial and provide a counter-example of graph transformation systems which is not functorial

Reversible Sesqui-Pushout Rewriting

The paper proposes a variant of sesqui-pushout rewriting (SqPO) that allows one to develop the theory of nested application conditions (NACs) for arbitrary rule spans; this is a considerable generalisation compared with existing results for NACs, which only hold for linear rules (w.r.t. a suitable class of monos). Besides this main contribution, namely an adapted shifting construction for NACs, the paper presents a uniform commutativity result for a revised notion of independence that applies to arbitrary rules; these theorems hold in any category with (enough) stable pushouts and a class of monos rendering it weak adhesive HLR. To illustrate results and concepts, we use simple graphs, i.e. the category of binary endorelations and relation preserving functions, as it is a paradigmatic example of a category with stable pushouts; moreover, using regular monos to give semantics to NACs, we can shift NACs over arbitrary rule spans

Computational category-theoretic rewriting

We demonstrate how category theory provides specifications that can efficiently be implemented via imperative algorithms and apply this to the field of graph rewriting. By examples, we show how this paradigm of software development makes it easy to quickly write correct and performant code. We provide a modern implementation of graph rewriting techniques at the level of abstraction of finitely-presented C-sets and clarify the connections between C-sets and the typed graphs supported in existing rewriting software. We emphasize that our open-source library is extensible: by taking new categorical constructions (such as slice categories, structured cospans, and distributed graphs) and relating their limits and colimits to those of their underlying categories, users inherit efficient algorithms for pushout complements and (final) pullback complements. This allows one to perform double-, single-, and sesqui-pushout rewriting over a broad class of data structures

On the essence of parallel independence for the double-pushout and sesqui-pushout approaches

Parallel independence between transformation steps is a basic notion in the algebraic approaches to graph transformation, which is at the core of some static analysis techniques like Critical Pair Analysis. We propose a new categorical condition of parallel independence and show its equivalence with two other conditions proposed in the literature, for both left-linear and non-left-linear rules. Next we present some preliminary experimental results aimed at comparing the three conditions with respect to computational efficiency. To this aim, we implemented the three conditions, for left-linear rules only, in the Verigraph system, and used them to check parallel independence of pairs of overlapping redexes generated from some sample graph transformation systems over categories of typed graphs