A three-dimensional space can be divided into octants, where each of x,
y and z can be positive or negative. Now, if we take the 
we calculated above, we can easily classify each
of the 
as belonging to one of the
eight possible octants. By considering which of these octants
dominate, we can get an effective measure of the general flow of a
sign.
Figure 5.5: Two examples of vectors and the octants they
fall into -- one in octant 
and the other in octant 
.
In figure 5.5 we can see two examples of such vectors.
In addition, we make sure that the length of the sign has no impact, by ensuring the sum of all ``octant counts'' is normalised to 1.