An Encyclopedia is an abstract container intended for smallish data sets which provides many of the benefits of a relational (and non-relational) database, but with lower syntactic friction. In particular, an Encyclopedia uses arithmetic expressions typical of core storage mechanisms (e.g. lists, dictionaries) to perform common dataset operations such as merging and subsetting. Encyclopedia supports functional composition, enabling modifications to entire Encyclopedias in a single statement, similar to data frame vectorization.

See http://encyclopedia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html for further information