Marlabs Blog

Treemaps are a growing trend in data visualization and chances are that you have spotted one or two around the web. But what are they?

Treemaps are basically graphic-based information and exploration tools that are especially helpful when examining data in an interactive mode. They represent hierarchical and categorical data in a mosaic form containing embedded, rectangular shapes, where the size of each shape is germane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

History of tree maps from the “founder”

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/

The above link also has some downloadable tools for generating tree maps, along with some excellent algorithms.

How to create Treemaps?

Most leading commercial BI tools support creation of tree maps in their dashboards. But if you don’t have access to one and want to play with and understand it, you could do worse than go here:

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Treemap.html

Here’s a good treemap that I stumbled upon recently:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10187248

The interesting stuff on supercomputers is a bonus!