Implementation of an interactive visualization tool for analyzing dynamic hierarchies

Abstract

Many real world examples can be found that deal with hierarchical data. Software systems typically consist of packages, directories, subdirectories, files, classes, and functions. Phylogenetic trees structure biological species into a hierarchical organization. Visualizing such static hierarchical data has been in focus of Information Visualization for many years. Visually encoding and understanding of evolving hierarchies still remains a challenging task. Since hierarchies may grow huge and may evolve over a long time producing many time steps, we make use of a side-by-side and aligned representation of Indented Pixel Tree Plots. To achieve a mental map preserving overview-based diagram we show the dynamics of a hierarchy by a static representation and illustrate the changes between subsequent hierarchies by special links. Interactive features make the data manipulable and navigable in all dimensions.