In a nutshell, it establishes relationships between objects, assigning children and parent links, and permits the analysis of those relationships.

A Parent-Child relationship is a hierarchical structure where some objects belong to other objects and vice versa. The individual objects have their own characteristics (volume, surface area, intensity), but also features dependent on those relationships (ID of the parent, number of children). The Compartments operation is specifically concerned with establishing the relationships between parent segments and their children. Other types of parents exist, such as tracks or groups, but the compartments operation is specifically concerned with the overlap or proximity of different object types.