Abstraction, Levels of Detail, and Hierarchies in Map Series

摘要

Humans know how to 'abstract away' detail instinctively. This is a necessary survival trait, since we cannot possibly save in our brain all the detail around us. So we extract only the necessary information for the task at hand. While abstracting, we extract a subset from a very large but finite set of objects around us. If continuing to choose subsets of objects with even more abstract properties we create levels of detail of objects. The structure created by such an abstraction process is a hierarchy. The type of hierarchy depends on the operation used for the abstraction process. Current spatial information systems lack the structures, tools, and operations to handle representations with multiple levels of detail. Very little is known about using hierarchies for the description of ordered levels of detail. This paper explores the relationships between abstraction, levels of detail, and hierarchies first theoretically and then practically with an example from analogue map series.