The Organization of the 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 have a parent node with any number of child nodes that can subsequently be parent nodes themselves. By organizing information 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: The relationships of animal species in a hierarchical tree structure

In the preceding diagram, you can see an example of how relational information between varieties of animals can be...