Directions can of course also be expressed quantitatively, using bearings relative to a given direction. Proximal relationships are either qualitative, such as near and far, or quantitative such as a distance in kilometres. The particular spatial relationship of containment, such as 'London contains South Kensington' is very important as it allows the possibility of constructing hierarchies of concepts and indeed, in principle, hierarchies across different concepts. For example, production place may be expressed in terms of a political division into counties and towns, or an ethnographic division into tribal territories. Collection place will often be given as a site name, or a geophysical region, rather than a geopolitical name.
Geophysical regions are clearly on a very different scale from museum locations.
Context, stratum, and indeed topographic location, may be regarded as three dimensional concepts, but others are usually regarded as two dimensional. Regarding time, geopolitical boundaries vary through time, as a result of wars and other political events, but archaeological contexts probably do not. For example, in many cases sites will be contained by geopolitical counties, and location codes will subdivide addresses. Many museums have recognised the importance of controlling geographical information, and have expended a significant amount of effort creating their own, perhaps rather limited, geographical term lists. While they have recognised the retrieval advantages of well developed hierarchies, museums have found building them to be resource intensive, and, in most cases, resource limits have restricted progress.