Abstract description of the copan:CORE modeling framework

This section describes the copan:CORE World-Earth modeling framework, its concepts and overall data model in abstract and mathematical terms. For its realization in computer software, see Software design (independent of programming language), and for the current implementation in the Python programming language, see Python implementation.

The goal of the copan:CORE World-Earth modeling framework is to support the development and use of dynamical models of those processes that are important for the fate of environment and humanity on a global scale on various time scales, to gain a better understanding of their feedbacks, important parameters, and possible emergent dynamics, and to help answering research questions about its resilience and possibilities of sustainable management and policy.

Since the global system consists of entities and processes of quite different type – environmental, social-metabolic/economic, cultural, etc. – such modeling tasks typically require people from various disciplines, coming from different schools of thought and using different modeling techniques such as ordinary differential equations, algebraic equations, discrete-time stochastic processes, agent-based modeling, complex adaptive networks, etc.

At the same time, the complexity of the global system suggests that rather than trying to specify a complete model of all its components to answer all possible research questions, it is more appropriate to follow a modular approach that provides an extensible set of model components from which specific models for specific research questions can be composed.

copan:CORE and its Python implementation pycopancore thus provide a framework in which researchers and developers from the World-Earth modeling community and related communities can collaboratively design and implement model components and then use those to compose and study specific models for specific research questions.

Contents:

• Language, basic terminology, and concepts
  • Entities, processes, attributes
  • Processes and attributes “belong to” entity-types or process taxons
  • Formal process-types and data-types
  • Modularization into model components and models
  • All attributes are treated as “Variables” with metadata
• Entity-types in the copan:CORE base model
  • Entity or attribute?
  • Basic relationships
• Taxonomy of processes
  • Process taxon “Environment”
  • Process taxon “Social Metabolism”
  • Process taxon “Culture”
• Process-types
  • Process-type “Ordinary Differential Equation”
  • Process-type “Explicit Equation”
  • Process-type “Implicit Equation”
  • Process-type “Event”
  • Process-type “Step”