Tangram treemaps : an enclosure geometrical partitioning method with various shapes

Publication Type:
Thesis
Issue Date:
2012
Full metadata record
In practices, analysts need to monitor multiple views and real time processes in one physical screen simultaneously regularly, due to the time demands or multi-task requirements. More often the visualization tool shares the screen space with other concurrent projects or process sessions. Although the traditional enclosure (or space-filling) tree approach can guarantee the maximization of space utilization in an isolated session display (that commonly occupies a single rectangular geometrical area), they however do not consider the maximization of display utilization of the whole computer screen, where a number of concurrent sessions are running in one screen. This thesis proposes a new enclosure visualization method, named Tangram Treemaps that achieves the maximization of the computer screen utilization through the flexibility of display (or container) shapes. Breaking through the limitation of rectangular constraint, the new approach is able to partition various polygonal shapes. Furthermore, our algorithms also improve the efficiency of interactive tree visualization significantly, through the reduction of the computational cost. Finally, we provide three case studies to demonstrate the commercial value of our method by using different datasets; we evaluate the method according to graph drawing and perceptual guidelines to show the advantage in scientific measurements; we conduct three user studies to compare the performance of our method with the traditional treemaps. Research results have proven that Tangram Treemaps could be adopted into a wider range of applications, taken in account its real-time performance and the quality of the visualization layouts.
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