Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Reaction: Tree-Maps: A space filling approach to visualization of hierarchical information structures

I found this paper very interesting as it has touched some of the core areas of visualizations of Tree Maps . Also the paper was helpful as it compares the other visualizations with the Tree Maps and discusses its pros and cons.

Hierarchical structure of data represent an important aspect of visualization, especially when we have huge set of data to analyze/browse through. For example, the directory structure of a File system helps us to categorize files in a better way and makes better utilization of resources and the space available.

Venn diagram on the other hand, is a good way to compare the small set of hierarchical dataset. However, visually it becomes quite challenging to analyze huge set of data with the Venn Diagrams.

I feel that even though treemaps are quite modern way to visualize the data according to the authors, it somehow fails to deliver and not scalable for large set of data. What we need today is better search algorithms to search for the data created by the user. Basically, user should create content and visualize it according to his or her needs, which again points to the need for dynamic visualizations.

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