1. Introduction

2. The emerging structures

3. Patterns in representation and understanding

4. The think lens

5. Multi-dimensional methodology

6. Characteristics and principles of understanding and representation

7. Implicit links in multi-dimensional space

8. General citation

9. Dimensions of summary

10. Multi-dimensional evaluation

11. Incorporating pictures into a summary

12. Summarizing videos, graphs and pictures

13. General framework of summarization

14. Summarization of things in Cyber-Physical Society

15. Limitations and challenges

16. Creative summarization

17. Conclusion

Text summarization has been studied for over a half century, but traditional methods process texts empirically and neglect the fundamental characteristics and principles of language use and understanding. Automatic summarization is a desirable technique for processing big data. This reference summarizes previous text summarization approaches in a multi-dimensional category space, introduces a multi-dimensional methodology for research and development, unveils the basic characteristics and principles of language use and understanding, investigates some fundamental mechanisms of summarization, studies dimensions on representations, and proposes a multi-dimensional evaluation mechanism. Investigation extends to incorporating pictures into summary and to the summarization of videos, graphs and pictures, and converges to a general summarization method. Further, some basic behaviors of summarization are studied in the complex cyber-physical-social space. Finally, a creative summarization mechanism is proposed as an effort toward the creative summarization of things, which is an open process of interactions among physical objects, data, people, and systems in cyber-physical-social space through a multi-dimensional lens of semantic computing. The author's insights can inspire research and development of many computing areas.