Generalized Pythagoras Trees: A Fractal Approach to Hierarchy Visualization

Paper pdf-Version

Fabian Beck's Generalized Pythagoras Trees Webpage

The NCBI taxonomy as Generalized Pythagoras Tree

On June 12th, 2014, we received an email stating:

The paper that you have presented at IVAPP 2014 with the title Generalized Pythagoras Trees for Visualizing Hierarchies has been selected to be included in the Lecture Notes, more specifically in the series of CCIS - Communications in Computer and Information Science, published by Springer (Springer Best Papers Book). This book will include the updated and extended versions of only a short list of selected papers from IVAPP 2014.

We accepted this invitation and updated the former version of the IVAPP Paper. The updated title for the book chapter is now Generalized Pythagoras Trees: A Fractal Approach to Hierarchy Visualization. In the book chapter a section on implementation details of the visualization tool is now included which was not possible in the paper due to page limitations. The tool was implemented by Tanja Munz for her pre-diploma thesis. Many interaction techniques are integrated in this tool which are also described now in the book chapter together with illustrating figures.

The visualization tool for the Generalized Pythagoras Trees was implemented in C++ and Qt. With it, arbitrary hierarchical datasets can be displayed. Those can be given in Newick format stored on a text file or the local file system can be directly read by the tool.

The hierarchy can be shown but by changing several parameters, the user is able to interactively change the appearance of the displayed Generalized Pythagoras Tree. After an exploration process the analyst can decide to store parts of the tree as an image by applying a PNG export.

1.1 The Graphical User Interface

1.2 Import

1.3 Functions and Interaction Techniques

1.4 Export