First Impressions of Structural Computing

A lot of research is computer science is sort of boilerplate. Like when a graduate student incrementally improves a known solution to a given problem in an established area of research. Even when it's hard, that's the easy stuff, it seems. The hard stuff involves creating a new area of research altogether. That's what Peter J. Nürnberg is up to with his idea of "structural computing." So far, a couple of pages into a couple of his papers, and really not being familiar with the hypermedia corpus, the first thing that comes to mind is a data structure in which every element is connected to every other element by way of common data structures -- e.g. array, list, hash table -- so as to enable on-the-fly views of the data to be created. And this suggests the need to transform one view into another view arbitrarily, which in turn reminds me of category theory, data provenance, and the stuff that Benjamin Pierce has been working on, but not necessarily in that order and not to imply a relationship among those things that doesn't exist.