Entity–attribute–value model
TYPE OF SPACE-EFFICIENT DATA MODEL
Entity-Attribute-Value model; Object-attribute-value model; Open schema; EAV model; Entity-attribute-value model
Entity–attribute–value model (EAV) is a data model to encode, in a space-efficient manner, entities where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that can be used to describe them is potentially vast, but the number that will actually apply to a given entity is relatively modest. Such entities correspond to the mathematical notion of a sparse matrix.