I suppose we could assert that wherever a cycle is discovered, A subset of B subset of C subset of A, then all nodes in the cycle should be merged into a single node. Then we have a DAG. Any cycle that’s not so reduced would be breaking the rules, and the graph db would be not fully “normalized” (not sure if that’s the best word here).
The reason for deviating from that and allowing cycles is UX. Suppose I develop the concept for cities. I want to arrange them by continent, and also by their official languages. And I want to visualize the tree of Sets in the page. On the left I arrange them by continent — cities in N America, cities in Europe, etc — and on the right I arrange them by language: cities that list English as an official language, cities that list French as an official language, etc. Any given city will be an element of more than one Set node.
So at the top I’d have the Superset of all cities, then underneath two subsets: Cities that have an official language and Cities that are on a continent. Those two set nodes are each subsets of the other. (In theory they don’t have to be — there could be a city that’s not on any continent — but in reality, to the best of my knowledge, they are.) But we still keep them as separate nodes because it’s just better UX.
straycat / david
npub1u5…rldq3
2026-02-13 03:51:34 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…tdmn
Author Public Key
npub1u5njm6g5h5cpw4wy8xugu62e5s7f6fnysv0sj0z3a8rengt2zqhsxrldq3Published at
2026-02-13 03:51:34 UTCEvent JSON
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