PansyTree: Merging Multiple Hierarchies

Abstract

Hierarchical structures are very common in the real world for recording all kinds of relational data generated in our daily life and business procedures. A very popular visualization method for displaying such data structures is called "Tree". So far, there are a variety of Tree visualization methods that have been proposed and most of them can only visualize one hierarchical dataset at a time. Hence, it raises the difficulty of comparison between two or more hierarchical datasets.In this paper, we proposed Pansy Tree which used a tree metaphor to visualize merged hierarchies. We design a unique icon named pansy to represent each merged node in the structure. Each Pansy is encoded by three colors mapping data items from three different datasets in the same hierarchical position (or tree node). The petals and sepal on Pansy are designed for showing each attribute’s values and hierarchical information. We also redefine the links in force layout encoded by width and animation to better convey hierarchical information. We further apply Pansy Tree into CNCEE datasets and demonstrate two use cases to verify its effectiveness.The main contribution of this work is to merge three datasets into one tree that makes it much easier to explore and compare the structures, data items and data attributes with visual tools.