<p>A complicated-sounding term with no good explanations from a simple google search... are there any more academically-oriented folk who could explain this one?</p>

Okay, just going to hazard a COMPLETE guess here, based on this
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4276578
I'd say it's a mathematical representation of parametric polymorphism (generics).