Of maps bigger than the empire

In a passage by J.L. Borges on the "exactitude of Science," a fictitious author describes an Empire in which the art of Cartography "logro tal perfeccion que el mapa de una sola Provincia ocupaba toda la Ciudad, y el mapa del Imperio toda una Provincia." With time, these huge maps wouldn\´t be enough, and the Colleges of the Cartographers erected a map of the Empire that equalled in width the Empire itself... This paper concerns itself with increasing cases of pattern discovery and data mining in which synopses, indices and relationships thereof seem to grow faster and bigger than the phenomena they were meant to encapsulate. The paper then reviews specific examples of algorithmic and combinatorial constructs that proved capable of alleviating such paradoxes in the author\´s recent work experience.