Combining Interactive Hierarchy Visualizations in a Web-based Application
Michael Burch, Willem Aerts, Daan Bon, Sean McCarren, Laurent Rothuizen, Olivier Smet, Daan Wöltgens · 2019
In this paper we describe a web-based tool combining several hierarchy visualization techniques. Those run in a browser and support the communication of hierarchy data that is omnipresent in many application fields like biology, software engineering, sports, or in algorithmic approaches like hierarchical clustering. To this end we provide node-link diagrams, Pythagoras trees, circular, as well as 3D treemaps also called 3D step-trees to give several visual perspectives on the same data and to improve data exploration tasks. The visualizations are interactive and linked, while the tool is available online, making it easily accessible for people all around the world without installing extra software or relying on additional libraries and frameworks. Hierarchy datasets can be uploaded to a server and shared with others. The visualizations were primarily implemented using JavaScript, and more specifically, rendered using the D3.js library. We illustrate the usefulness of the interactive visualization by applying them to the NCBI taxonomy and the Influenza dataset.