ABSTRACT
The treatment of data at multiple scales is well-established in the spatial analytical literature and is becoming increasingly common in broader discussions of biophysical and landscape processes. Quattrochi provides a “lexicon of scale” that presents the fundamental dimensions of the problem. Nevertheless, the word "scale" will be avoided because it has strict cartographic and loose physical meanings that are opposite in intent, and because the term is better constrained to references to some continuum (small to big) than applied to specific levels within the range. The visualization of data pyramids is quite common; indeed, all grids can in some sense be regarded as generalizations of the real-world data on which they are based, and most practical visualizations are further generalized (for display, transmission, or analysis) from some lowest-level dataset.
