Milner's bigraphs

[This post is still changing!]

I'm currently attending a course by Robin Milner on Bigraphs. This is interesting in many ways, not least, to me, for how many of the things I've been interested in over the years it ties together. There must obviously be connections with MDD, but what's less clear to me right now is which connections are worth exploring. In some sense the bigraph formalism is a metametamodelling language, in which the metamodels are the bigraphical reactive systems and the models are maybe the states (configurations) of those systems? A bigraph consists of a place structure and a link structure: the place structure gives the containment hierarchy of parts, while the link structure specifies what can talk to what. A reaction rule can allow a ground bigraph to change either or both of these structures. Anyway, the course is not over yet, but I ordered the book.

This morning Jean Krivine gave a nice talk about the application of bigraphs to biological systems.

Off to hear about the category theory...