Temporal Treemaps: Static Visualization of Evolving Trees.

Abstract

We consider temporally evolving trees with changing topology and data: tree nodes may persist for a time range, merge or split, and the associated data may change. Essentially, one can think of this as a time series of trees with a node correspondence per hierarchy level between consecutive time steps. Existing visualization approaches for such data include animated 2D treemaps, where the dynamically changing layout makes it difficult to observe the data in its entirety. We present a method to visualize this dynamic data in a static, nested, and space-filling visualization. This is based on two major contributions: First, the layout constitutes a graph drawing problem. We approach it for the entire time span at once using a combination of a heuristic and simulated annealing. Second, we propose a rendering that emphasizes the hierarchy through an adaption of the classic cushion treemaps. We showcase the wide range of applicability using data from feature tracking in time-dependent scalar fields, evolution of file system hierarchies, and world population.