The keyword nearness indicates that things are related to or similar (or dissimilar) to each other at local or nearby scales rather than a global scale. In other words, Tobler’s law holds on each scale (rather than across scales) reflecting more or less similar things nearby: the nearer two things are, the more related (similar or dissimilar) they are; or conversely, the more distant they are, the less related (similar or dissimilar) they are. Related to these two keywords is the fact that topological connection makes better sense than geometric details, as reflected in central place theory (Christaller1933, 1966), Jiang 2018); see more detail in Figure 1 and related discussions.
