setsdata

Setsdata is a data modeling concept used to represent collections of sets and their relationships within information systems. It provides a formal schema to describe named sets, their elements, and the operations that relate them, such as union, intersection, difference, and subset relations. Setsdata is designed to help organize, compare, and reason about groupings of items across databases, catalogs, and ontologies.

At its core, the setsdata model defines set entities with identifiers and optional metadata; element carriers that can be literals or references; and relations such as is-subset-of and disjoint-with. It supports both extensional definitions (explicit elements) and intensional definitions (rules or predicates that generate elements). Cardinality, provenance, and constraints may be included to support data quality and audit trails. The model emphasizes interoperability, allowing sets to be composed, queried, and reasoned about in a consistent way across different storage backends and tools.

Encodings for setsdata typically reuse existing formats such as JSON, YAML, or RDF-like graphs. A common pattern is to index sets by identifiers, list elements or references, and optionally attach metadata like source, validity period, and provenance. Query mechanisms may include set algebra expressions or graph traversals that respect the defined relations, enabling precise retrieval of combined or related sets.

Applications include access-control policies, feature selection in machine learning, data catalog tagging, and knowledge-graph curation, where sets and their interactions need to be tracked consistently. See also set theory, set operations, power set, Venn diagrams, knowledge graph, and data modeling.