Treemapping

The treemapping is a technique of representation of hierarchical data in a limited space, such as for example the screen of a Ordinateur.

Short history

With the beginning of the year 1990, Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, was confronted with a recurring problem of lack of disk space on the waiter of his laboratory, equipped at the time of a disc of 80 Mo. The fourteen customers having access to the waiter filled all the disk space available. It needed a tool making it possible to know how space was used, which were the bulkiest files and who were the owners. Frustrated by the traditional tools representing the tree structures in the form of diagrams node-bonds, Dr. Shneiderman conceived Treemaps.

The subjacent idea consists in distributing the space of representation (the screen or paper) between the various entities of the tree structure and to associate with each one of them a rectangle whose size and color reflect attributes of the corresponding entity. This technique of visualization of information makes it possible the end user to easily recognize graphic reasons being able to translate complex relations within the data, relations difficult to detect differently.

The algorithm of the treemaps

To come.

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