Hypergraph Interchange Format invitation

[colltoaction]

Hi! I'm Martín and I'm a developer working in the HIF project, an effort to share hypergraphs across many libraries, developed by members of SimpleHypergraphs.jl, XGI and other established libraries. We are looking to expand the community actively reaching out to higher-order network analysis, topological deep learning, and applied category theory libraries.

I looked at the serialization facilities of this package and found that you had to resort to your own implementation by lack of a standard. I hope would you consider checking our repository where we provide the specification of a standard JSON format. Adding to_hif and from_hif methods to your wiring diagrams would give Catlab immediate access to many datasets, while also the ability to export your hypergraphs for use in other packages. There are so far 4 Python implementations, each one with its own tutorial.

I'm interested in tackling the challenges that will come from differences in requirements from Network Science and Category Theory, which will make this standard a solid foundation for researchers of all areas.

Let me know what you think and any way I can help make this happen!

Catlab.jl/src/wiring_diagrams/JSON.jl

Lines 3 to 8 in 246b5fb

	JSON data formats are convenient when programming for the web. Unfortunately, no
	standard for JSON graph formats has gained any kind of widespread adoption. We
	adopt a format compatible with that used by the KEILER project and its successor
	ELK (Eclipse Layout Kernel). This format is roughly feature compatible with
	GraphML, supporting nested graphs and ports. It also supports layout information
	like node position and size.