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Abstract
Through their recursive definition, many fractals have an inherent hierarchical structure. An example are binary branching Pythagoras Trees. By stopping the recursion in certain branches, a binary hierarchy can be encoded and visualized. But this binary encoding is an obstacle for representing general hierarchical data such as file systems or phylogenetic trees, which usually branch into more than two subhierarchies. We hence extend Pythagoras Trees to arbitrarily branching trees by adapting the geometry of the original fractal approach. Each vertex in the hierarchy is visualized as a rectangle sized according to a metric. We analyze several visual parameters such as length, width, order, and color of the nodes against the use of different metrics. Interactions help to zoom, browse, and filter the hierarchy. The usefulness of our technique is illustrated by two case studies visualizing directory structures and a large phylogenetic tree. We compare our approach with existing tree diagrams and discuss questions of geometry, perception, readability, and aesthetics.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Kay Nieselt, University of Tübingen, for providing the NCBI taxonomy dataset.
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VISUS, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
Fabian Beck, Michael Burch, Tanja Munz & Daniel Weiskopf
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Catania, Catania, Italy
Lorenzo Di Silvestro
- Fabian Beck
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- Michael Burch
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- Tanja Munz
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- Lorenzo Di Silvestro
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- Daniel Weiskopf
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Correspondence toFabian Beck.
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Dip. di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Catania, Catania, Catania, Italy
Sebastiano Battiato
Inria/ZIRST, Saint Ismier, France
Sabine Coquillart
INRIA-Rennes/MimeTIC Tean, Rennes cedex, France
Julien Pettré
Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Robert S. Laramee
Computer Science, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
Andreas Kerren
do IPS, Escola Superior de Tecnologia, Setúbal, Portugal
José Braz
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Beck, F., Burch, M., Munz, T., Di Silvestro, L., Weiskopf, D. (2015). Generalized Pythagoras Trees: A Fractal Approach to Hierarchy Visualization. In: Battiato, S., Coquillart, S., Pettré, J., Laramee, R., Kerren, A., Braz, J. (eds) Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics - Theory and Applications. VISIGRAPP 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 550. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25117-2_8
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