Dr. rer. nat. Dipl.-Inform. Michael Burch
Email: michael.burch@visus.uni-stuttgart.de


VISUS - Institut für Visualisierung und Interaktive Systeme - Stuttgart

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TimeSpiderTrees: A Novel Visual Metaphor for Dynamic Compound Graphs

Paper pdf-Version
A TimeSpiderTrees representation for yearly soccer results of national teams

A TimeSpiderTrees representation for yearly soccer results of national teams

The TimeSpiderTrees visualization is a radial representation for dynamic relational data in an information hierarchy, i.e., evolving compound digraphs are displayed. It uses a static diagram to show the time dimension making it easy to analyze the time-varying data for trends, countertrends, and/or anomalies.

The vertices of each graph are mapped equidistantly to the circumference of circles of different radii in the same order on each single circle. An edge between two vertices is typically represented by drawing a straight line from the start to the target vertex. Doing this would lead to many link crossings and overlaps causing a vast amount of visual clutter.

The TimeSpiderTrees uses the concept of partially drawn links, showing only the starting part of each link. The viewer can see the direction of each link and the density of many links leaving the same start vertex. By only drawing partial links, visual clutter is reduced and the representation gets clearer. The approach has some limitations, i.e. the number of represented graphs is limited by the size of the circle and consequently, each graph by the thickness of each annulus.

The visualization tool supports several interactive features. If you are interested in our visualization approach please read our VL/HCC 2010 paper or write an email.