What does route summarization mean?

What does route summarization mean?

Summarization is the process by which we collapse many routes with a long mask to form another route with a shorter mask. Refer to OSPF and Route Summarizationand the “Summarization” section of Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocolfor more information. The auto-summarycommand works only if you have contiguous subnets. If you work with discontiguous subnets, you need to use the ip summary-addressinterface configuration command on every interface that participates in the routing process where you want to configure summarization