I am looking into ways to digitally catalogue the corpus of practical knots, such as the normal knots we talk about every day here in the IGKT forum, and see in books, and use in daily life.
I would prefer to build on existing work rather than invent another notation or format. I've looked at Gauss codes, Dowker-Thistlethwaite codes, and other planar knot notation but found they don't work for 3D knots, knots with a 'host' or core like many hitches and the Monkey's Fist among many others.
Mathematical knot studies that I have read seem to have focused on closed-loop, 2D knots. For practical knots, however, the full 3D arrangement is important: open ends and bights, multiple turns, rope diameter, a core in a Monkey's fist, rings or spars, contact/friction, loading, and the sequence in which a knot is tied.
Does anyone know of useful existing open source work in any of these areas? (I've no interest in proprietary or closed-source work, I can't/won't use it)
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3D libraries or digital models of practical knots.
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Knot-specific software such as KnotPlot, especially where it supports open cords rather than only closed mathematical knots.
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CAD, animation, VR, textile/yarn, engineering, or rope-simulation tools that could represent a tied rope well.
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Existing IGKT projects, publications, members, or archives covering digital 3D knot models.
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Formats or conventions worth adopting for sharing such models.
The aim is not necessarily to model every physical knot property right away, but it would be nice to be able to extend the system towards that destination of a full 'practical knot simulator'.
A useful first step might simply be a reliable, inspectable 3D representation that can support a catalogue, interactive viewer, comparison of variants, and eventually physical simulation. I'm in favour of simple, textual formats that can be hand-written by humans but parsed by computers (a good example of this is Mermaid diagrams)
References, links, examples, and contacts would all be very welcome, including older or abandoned projects.
