Authors:
Willy Scheibel
;
Matthias Trapp
;
Daniel Limberger
and
Jürgen Döllner
Affiliation:
Hasso Plattner Institute, Faculty of Digital Engineering, University of Potsdam, Germany
Keyword(s):
Treemaps, Taxonomy.
Abstract:
A treemap is a visualization that has been specifically designed to facilitate the exploration of tree-structured
data and, more general, hierarchically structured data. The family of visualization techniques that use a
visual metaphor for parent-child relationships based “on the property of containment” (Johnson, 1993) is
commonly referred to as treemaps. However, as the number of variations of treemaps grows, it becomes
increasingly important to distinguish clearly between techniques and their specific characteristics. This paper
proposes to discern between Space-filling Treemap TS, Containment Treemap TC, Implicit Edge Representation
Tree TIE, and Mapped Tree TMT for classification of hierarchy visualization techniques and highlights their
respective properties. This taxonomy is created as a hyponymy, i.e., its classes have an is-a relationship to one
another: TS TC TIE TMT. With this proposal, we intend to stimulate a discussion on a more unambiguous
classification of treemaps
and, furthermore, broaden what is understood by the concept of treemap itself.
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