1. A method comprising: under control of a processor configured with computer-executable instructions, receiving a collection of data associated with a real world computing system; determining a plurality of changes to the collection of data; representing the plurality of changes to the collection of data as elements in a lattice, wherein the lattice represents an organizational pattern type by which the plurality of changes are arranged so that the plurality of changes can be processed by one or more operators in different combinations; defining the one or more operators in a data-parallel program; modeling, during execution of the data-parallel program, the one or more operators in a dataflow graph that propagates the plurality of changes to the collection of data through a plurality of vertices; and determining an output collection of data based at least in part on performing one or more computations on one or more of the elements in the lattice using the one or more operators.