I-Corps: Solving Information-Integration Problems Using Category Theory

简单的商业问题可能很难回答。对于一家大公司来说，像“有多少员工免税？“可能需要使用多个数据模型和可能不一致的定义查询数百个数据库：例如，“承包商”也是“雇员”吗？“在过去的5年里，这个I-Corps团队开发了一种新技术，用于执行信息集成任务，例如基于范畴理论的查询，组合和进化数据库，范畴理论是数学的一个分支，已经彻底改变了计算机科学的几个领域，包括函数式编程。范畴理论提供了广泛使用的数据关系模型所缺少的理论指导，这个团队已经用它来构建一个原型软件工具FQL（categoricaldata.net/fql.html），用于比现有的关系工具更快更准确地集成数据库。但FQL仍然是一个学术原型。该项目的目的是进行客户发现活动，以便团队能够更好地了解（1）市场对这项新技术的需求，以及（2）工业强度工具应该采取的确切形式，例如编程语言，Java库，云服务等。在I-Corps计划期间，团队将采访100多个潜在客户，包括各行业大型企业的IT经理、熟悉现有工具的ETL和数据库专家以及在流程设计中使用数据库的工程师。该团队将使用这些客户信息来找到适合该技术的产品市场：例如，客户是否对平台或内部解决方案感兴趣，建议的解决方案需要如何定制，传达建议的技术的最佳方式是什么，并开发用于分类数据的工业强度工具。具体来说，该团队将开发用例场景，在潜在客户上对现有的FQL工具进行alpha测试，并使用这些信息来验证和改进用例。在I-Corps计划结束时，该团队计划有一个演示，一个明确的商业化计划和一个最小的可行产品。

Simple business questions can be surprisingly hard to answer. For a large company, a question like "how many employees are tax-exempt?" may require querying hundreds of databases using multiple data models and possibly inconsistent definitions: for example, is a "contractor" also an 'employee?" Over the past 5 years, this I-Corps team has developed a new technology for performing information-integration tasks such as querying, combining, and evolving databases based on category theory, a branch of mathematics that has already revolutionized several areas of computer science, including functional programming. Category theory provides theoretical guidance missing from the widely-used relational model of data, and this team has used it to build a prototype software tool, FQL (categoricaldata.net/fql.html), for integrating databases more quickly and accurately than existing relational tools. But FQL is still an academic prototype. The purpose of this project is to perform customer discovery activities so that the team can better understand (1) the market demand for this new technology and (2) the exact form that an industrial-strength tool should take, e.g. a programming language, a Java library, a cloud service, etc.During the I-Corps program, the team will interview 100+ potential customers, including IT managers of large enterprise companies in a variety of sectors, ETL and database specialists familiar with existing tools, and engineers who use databases in their process design. This team will use this customer information to find a product-market fit for the technology: e.g. are the customers interested in platforms or in-house solutions, how customized do the proposed solutions need to be, what is the best way of communicating the proposed technology-and to develop an industrial-strength tool for categorical data. Specifically, this team will develop use-case scenarios, alpha-test the existing FQL tool on potential customers, and use this information to validate and refine use-cases. By the end of the I-Corps program, the team plans to have a demo, a clear commercialization plan and a minimal viable product.