Generalized Pythagoras Trees for Visualizing Hierarchies

Fabian Beck, Michael Burch, Tanja Munz, Lorenzo Di Silvestro, Daniel Weiskopf

2014

Abstract

Pythagoras Trees are fractals that can be used to depict binary hierarchies. But this binary encoding is an obstacle for visualizing hierarchical data such as file systems or phylogenetic trees, which branch into n subhierarchies. Although any hierarchy can be modeled as a binary one by subsequently dividing n-ary branches into a sequence of n - 1 binary branches, we follow a different strategy. In our approach extending Pythagoras Trees to arbitrarily branching trees, we only need a single visual element for an n-ary branch instead of spreading the binary branches along a strand. Each vertex in the hierarchy is visualized as a rectangle sized according to a metric. We analyze several visual parameters such as length, width, order, and color of the nodes against the use of different metrics. The usefulness of our technique is illustrated by two case studies visualizing directory structures and a large phylogenetic tree. We compare our approach with existing tree diagrams and discuss questions of geometry, perception, readability, and aesthetics.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Beck F., Burch M., Munz T., Di Silvestro L. and Weiskopf D. (2014). Generalized Pythagoras Trees for Visualizing Hierarchies . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2014) ISBN 978-989-758-005-5, pages 17-28. DOI: 10.5220/0004654500170028

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ivapp14,
author={Fabian Beck and Michael Burch and Tanja Munz and Lorenzo Di Silvestro and Daniel Weiskopf},
title={Generalized Pythagoras Trees for Visualizing Hierarchies},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={17-28},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004654500170028},
isbn={978-989-758-005-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2014)
TI - Generalized Pythagoras Trees for Visualizing Hierarchies
SN - 978-989-758-005-5
AU - Beck F.
AU - Burch M.
AU - Munz T.
AU - Di Silvestro L.
AU - Weiskopf D.
PY - 2014
SP - 17
EP - 28
DO - 10.5220/0004654500170028