Jul 17

Written by: James Burke
Tuesday, July 17, 2007

A treemap is a method for displaying information that has a hierarchical relationship. A treemap is normally presented as a diagram that can be viewed in a small space such as on a computer monitor.

An excellent history of treemaps is available at the University of Maryland Deparment of Computer Science as well as the Wikipedia entry.

Data visualisation is rapidly growing in demand for the new breed of web applications where the volumes of data and interconnections require conveying in a practical way to the user.

del.icio.us is a great tool for social bookmarking that is quite simple in its data structure yet can be difficult to visualise in any way other than the standard list or "tagclouds". some alternative visualisations of del.icio.us include:

• treeview
• soup view
• freemind mindmap
• "graphing" tags (this example starts with the tag "scorm"
• spacenav (similar to soup view)
• tag cloud graph over time (this example is for the website www.becta.org.uk

For other data visualisations as used by digg, have a look at this blog entry.

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