Open ffl096 opened 1 month ago
A priori it is not clear how to deal with already existing data, as we cannot infer whether arbitrary user-data is relative to the orientation or not. For data that is relative to orientation, we might have to change the sign, for other data (with may also be numeric), we must not alter them.
We can work around this issue by replacing the attributes of existing simplices instead of updating/extending them. If we go that round, we should make this change consistently across all complexes though.
The Problem
Simplicial complexes are often used with an arbitrary reference orientation in mind, e.g., when considering edge flows. Consider this simple example:
The user should expect that the edge
(2, 1)
is added with exactly this orientation, i.e., with an edge flow of10
from node2
to node1
. However, TopoNetX does not handle orientation, it transforms the edge into canonical form(1, 2)
without any thought about associated data that might be orientation-aware.Possible Actions
SimplicialComplex.add_simplex
calls are only allowed for pre-sorted tuples.