TreeVersity: Comparing tree structures by topology and node's attributes differences

Abstract

It is common to classify data in hierarchies, they provide a comprehensible way of understanding big amounts of data. From budgets to organizational charts or even the stock market, trees are everywhere and people find them easy to use. However when analysts need to compare two versions of the same tree structure, or two related taxonomies, the task is not so easy. Much work has been done on this topic, but almost all of it has been restricted to either compare the trees by topology, or by the node attribute values. With this project we are proposing TreeVersity, a framework for comparing tree structures, both by structural changes and by differences in the node attributes. This paper is based on our previous work on comparing traffic agencies using LifeFlow [1, 2] and on a first prototype of TreeVersity.