The Organization of Hierarchy
Both the natural and human-made world contain many examples of organizing systems into hierarchies and why, for the most part, it makes a lot of sense. A common representation that is developed from these hierarchies can be seen in tree-based data structures. Imagine that you had a parent node with any number of child nodes that could subsequently be parent nodes themselves. By organizing concepts into a tree structure, you can build an information-dense diagram that clearly shows how things are related to their peers and their larger abstract concepts.
An example from the natural world to help illustrate this concept can be seen in how we view the hierarchy of animals, which goes from parent classes to individual species:
Figure 2.2: Navigating the relationships of animal species in a hierarchical tree structure
In Figure 2.2, you can see an example of how relational information between varieties of animals can be easily mapped out in a way that both saves space...
