Request for Comment: Wikipedia article(s) on RA

[venkatachalapathy]

As discussed in our meeting, we could think about creating a Wikipedia entry on Reconstructibility Analysis. This issue could be used to discuss what goes in it. I am happy to be part of the team or take the lead on it.

[gdcutting]

I'm working with some wiki-type content at my fork here: https://github.com/gdcutting/occam/wiki/Reconstructibility-Analysis-(RA)-Overview

It's definitely still in progress but this is a start. I've just been going through Marty's overview docs and trying to pare out the most essential information. Goal is to keep the language consistent with existing docs but just provider a shorter intro (wikipedia pages are typically a few thousand words, which is a fraction of the length of the Overview and Wholes and Parts papers).

One thing that I'm realizing there is a need for, particularly for a Wikipedia page (as opposed to our Github Wiki page) is a more formal definition of key RA objects (particularly relation, structure, and model). That's one component of any similar entry (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network). Wikipedia articles of this type are short but almost always include key formal mathematical definitions.

I haven't seen a definition yet for 'relation'. 'Structure' is defined as 'a non-redundant set of projections' but this is still not very formal. We have been discussing models as hypergraphs but, again, I don't see a formal definition anywhere.

I'll still be working on this for a little while but if anyone has comments I'd be glad to hear them to get a little guidance and make sure we're all on the same page.