Simple Tools for Abstraction and Instantiation

A simplified version of tools for abstraction and instantiation [1,2,3] are proposed here. The tools are merely two new attributes applicable to any DS instances. The merit of abstraction and instantiation is the economy of description and clarification of structural commonality. Abstractions allow you to avoid repeating similar descriptions. You write one template to address the shared structure of descriptions and reuse it when you want similar descriptions. Suppose you want to describe many occurrences of a common pattern of events and states of affairs, such as a type of configuration of soccer players in the field. You will describe the positions of eleven or twenty two people to address this configuration. Once you have described this common pattern, you can capture each occurrence of the pattern by just substituting the eleven or twenty-two people to with particular players, without repeating the descriptions of their positions, among others. Although the AbstractionLevel DataType in MPEG-7 FDIS is apparently claimed to address abstraction and instantiation, its usage and semantics have not been clarified enough to actually employ it. What follows should provide a far simpler and practically usable set of tools for abstraction and instantiation.