  We begin with pervasive ultrametricity due to high dimensionality and/or
spatial sparsity. How extent or degree of ultrametricity can be quantified
leads us to the discussion of varied practical cases when ultrametricity can be
partially or locally present in data. We show how the ultrametricity can be
assessed in text or document collections, and in time series signals. An aspect
of importance here is that to draw benefit from this perspective the data may
need to be recoded. Such data recoding can also be powerful in proximity
searching, as we will show, where the data is embedded globally and not locally
in an ultrametric space.
