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A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization

treevis.net

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Re: A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization

#11

Post by alanbernstein »

I don't think anything will top the squarified treemap for me, but I love this page.

I really don't get the appeal of the sunburst style visualizations. They seem like the worst possible use of area to [fail to] convey information.

I think I agree with arboles that a tree visualization wouldn't be appropriate for this page. However, this reminds me of an old idea I had, to present tree-based data structures in a tree. I was thinking something like a phylogenetic tree representing the evolution of these data structures over time. Too much of a research project for me though.

Re: A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization

#12

Post by jimmySixDOF »

bursted wrote: post #9
froh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to the limitations on how comments are structured, as trees, not DAGs, and not just on HN but nearly everywhere: have you ever encountered a "forum" or "chat" eher you can kind of star merge several threads with a single reply?

>>33567235 I can only think of Futaba-style discussion boards, that is, 4chan. On 4chan threads are linear, but you're supposed to reply to posts by mentioning their unique post nº. For example, the above comment would want to mention >>33566411 and >>33566389. You can mention as many posts as want. The posts get a backlink, so the thread is a navigable, true graph structure. Reading discussion on 4chan can be confus…

Yes. One of the biggest ironies is that the very best approach to open forum discussion is applied to some of the least useful uses of the application. The UI is as slapped together and confronting as the conversations but the proper branching graph system could make everything from search to navigation to LLM AI digestion of huge messaging systems just work better.

Re: A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization

#14

Post by hjschulz »

alanbernstein wrote: post #11

I don't think anything will top the squarified treemap for me, but I love this page. I really don't get the appeal of the sunburst style visualizations. They seem like the worst possible use of area to [fail to] convey information. I think I agree with arboles that a tree visualization wouldn't be appropriate for this page. However, this reminds me of an old idea I had, to present tree-based data structures in a tree…

Regarding arguments made for "sunburst style visualizations", it is usually that in Sunburst visualizations the drawing space increases with each level as the circumference of the radial plot increases. This is useful for trees, which usually have more nodes to show on lower levels closer to the leaves, than on higher levels closer to the root.

In comparison to the favored squarified treemap layout, sunburst visualizations are also able to represent an order in which the nodes may be given.

Regarding a tree visualization for the contents, we tried this in the beginning, but it often needs a lot of "editorializing" to decide which class to put a visualization technique in, if it would fit 2 or even 3 classes at the same time. Hence for the web-version, I switched over to a plain list. The old hierarchical layout can still be found at https://cs.au.dk/~hjschulz/pdfs/treevispo.pdf

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