Nondisjoint union closed families

A family of sets is nondisjoint union closed if for all pairs of sets in the family whenever those sets have a nonempty intersection then their union is contained in the family. Such families of sets are order connectivity preserving because each dependent component of the family is upper bounded by its union and it is therefore connected.

The laminar families are of course nondisjoint union closed because the only nondisjoint pairs of sets that appear in a laminar family are chains. This means that independent families which never contain nondisjoint pairs and laminar multichain families are nondisjoint union closed.

The union closed families are of course also nondisjoint union closed as they are both disjoint union closed and nondisjoint union closed at the same time. The connectivity complexes are precisely those families of sets that are subunique closed as well as nondisjoint union closed. The connectivity complexes describe the connected sets of a structure which are nondisjoint union closed because if two nondisjoint sets are connected then so is their union.