copyleft
Posts 1-1 of 1
-
Nils Sautter Group moderatorThe company name is only visible to registered members.Treemap - smartmoney.com
How to represent and visualize a lot of information at a glance is a hot topic in IT. A Treemap, also known as Heatmap, is an important tool for this. A TreeMap graphically represents a hierarchical structure. Typically, the hierarchy will involve a tree of nodes of different sizes and different colours.
A Heatmap/Treemap is great to see a lot of information in one glance. It can be interactive and allow you to drill down into some section of the hierarchy. More on treemapping on Wikipedia.
* Each box on the chart may be contained in another box (e.g. Microsoft and Sun in the Technology box, CitiGroup in Banking, etc hence the hierachical view.
* The size is usually determined by the relative size of a parameter in comparison to the full size of the chart (i.e. the 'bigger' X, the bigger it is on the chart).
* The colour shows another dimension in the parameters, like a movement in time (i.e. conventionally the greener, the bigger the increase; the 'redder', the bigger the decrease!).
A tree structure may includes more or less important elements. For example, in a tree structure of files, there can be big files or small files. It can be then interesting to know which directory is the biggest on a hard disk, at a glance!. But, in a treeview, we can't distinguish the significant elements. Treemap makes it possible to represent each element in a rectangle of more or less big size according to its importance in the tree structure. Moreover, we can add a code color which makes it possible to introduce new information into the representation of the tree structure.
For example, you can use Treemap to see :
* which is the most important directory on your hard disk.
* if your portfolio of stocks is well distributed between the various industry sectors.
* the map of the entire stock market (smartmoney.com)
jtreemap.sourceforge.net
- 06 Dec 2008, 03:09 am
