A car's ignition switch serves several purposes. First, it allows you to control the power to many of the car's accessories, preventing accessories from running down the car's battery when the car is parked for a long period of time.
Cardinality is the term used in database relations to denote the occurrences of data on either side of the relation. In the common data architecture, cardinality is documented with data integrity but not with data structure. There are several types of cardinality defining relationships between occurrences of entities on two sides of the line of relationships.
The cardinality of a set A is defined as its equivalence class under equinumerosity. A representative set is designated for each equivalence class. The most common choice is the initial ordinal in that class. This is usually taken as the definition of cardinal number in axiomatic set theory.