1661 Abstraction, Levels of Detail, and Hierarchies in Map Series Sabine Timpf Department of Geoinformation, Technical University Vienna, Gusshausstr.
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.