Saturday, August 08, 2009

Treemaps: Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions

Effectively visualising and understanding complex datasets is an extremely difficult task so I thought it worth highlighting the recent work of Aidan Slingsby, Jason Dykes and Jo Wood (who has also written a nice book about Java Programming for Spatial Sciences) , who are all from the giCentre at City University London on treemaps, especially how treemaps can be used for displaying and understanding hierarchical data.

In the paper entitled "Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions, to quote the authors "explore(s) the effects of selecting alternative layouts in hierarchical displays that show multiple aspects of large multivariate datasets, including spatial and temporal characteristics" For further information (including a paper) about the work, readers are advised to read the site: http://www.gicentre.org/hierarchical_layouts/.

Below is a short movie created by Aidan Slingsby demonstrating their work for the IEEE InfoVis Conference in Atlantic City this coming October:



Thanks to Aidan Slingsby for allowing us to use the movie.

Full reference: 
Slingsby, A., Dykes, J., Wood, J. and Crooks, A.T. (2009), The Role of Layout and Order in Treemaps for Showing Spatial and Temporal Variation in House Prices. GeoViz, Hamburg Germany. (pdf)

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