In this project, we examined ways to help present/depict hierarchical (tree) information structures in order to help people understand them and access the data in them. The Treemap visualization technique developed by Ben Shneiderman and Brian Johnson at Maryland is a well-known technique for depicting hierarchies. It uses a rectangular, space-filling slice-and-dice technique to visualize objects in the different levels of a hierarchy. The area and color of each item corresponds to an attribute of the item as well.
The SunBurst technique is an alternative, space-filling visualization that uses a radial rather than a rectangular layout. In SunBurst, items in a hierarchy are laid out radially, with the top of the hierarchy at the center and deeper leves farther away from the center. The angle swept out by an item and its color correspond to some atttribute of the data. For instance, in a visualization of a file system, the angle may correspond to the file/directory size and the color may correspond to the file type. An example Sunburst display is shown below.
Unless I'm mistaken, this is the view that the new GNOME disk usage reporting tool uses. It's just a bit arcane looking at first but it's usable after you get your head around what you're looking at.
