of the invention as defined in the claims embodiments of the present invention provide an approach to explore in a visual representation the relationships between objects arranged in the abstraction hierarchy the relationships between parent and child objects are depicted in the visual representation through the outer and inner circles wherein the outer circle is the parent of the inner circle likewise a sibling or peer relationship in the abstraction hierarchy is conveyed in the visual representation via the adjacent arcs within the same circle in a visual node the u201c similarity u201d relationships between elements are displayed through the chord lines within a visual node and through lines between visual nodes fig1 10 show a variety of aspects and embodiments of the present invention referring first to fig1 a visual node 100 is depicted having an outer circle 103 an inner circle 101 outer circle arcs 102 and inner circle arcs 104 each arc of an outer or inner circle represents at least one piece of visualized content according to the abstraction hierarchy if an arc represents a category grouping selecting the arc in the visualization will result in selecting the actual visualized content contained in the category grouping if an arc represents an object at an atomic level i e can not be further categorized or abstracted then selecting the arc will result in selecting a single piece of visualized content e g a data file or portion of the data file each visual node 39 s inner and outer circles are segmented into arcs in order to represent different abstractions and category groupings.