Treemap

Updated: 01/15/2008, G. Waloszek

Purpose

Treemap is a hierarchy-viewing object that displays up to thousands of elements at once showing multiple attributes. By recursively partitioning an element's rectangle among its children, a treemap presents the "big picture" of a hierarchy giving users X-ray vision into their mountains of data. Zooming, enter/leave notification, select actions, and much more are supported.

From HCIL Website: Treemap is a space-constrained visualization of hierarchical structures. It is very effective in showing attributes of leaf nodes using size and color coding. Treemap enables users to compare nodes and sub-trees even at varying depth in the tree, and help them spot patterns and exceptions. Treemap was first designed by Ben Shneiderman during the 1990s.

Applications

Display of large tree structures in WinSurfer (Windows) or TreeViz (Macintosh) as found in Web sites

Authors, Date

Ben Shneiderman, B. Johnson (HCIL); 1991

Links, Papers

• HCIL (University of Maryland): www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/
• Treemap: www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/index.shtml
• Overview article "Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies" (Ben Shneiderman): www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml
• Ying-Huey Fua: Visualizing Hierarchies Via Exotic Trees
• Johnson, B. & Shneiderman, B. (1991). Tree-maps: a space-filling approach to the visuakization of hierarchical information structures. IEEE Proceedings Information Visualization 1991, p. 284-291.