A combination of a treemap with a node-link diagram, showing the flare software package hierarchy. Click on a treemap region to create a new node displaying the corresponding subtree. Subtrees can be dragged around, and the whole visualization can be navigated with zoom and pan.
This experiment tries to address a known issue of treemaps: while they are very compact and good for presenting a tree’s overview, they fail to unambiguosly and clearly represent hierarchical structure. Node-link diagrams, on the other hand, are very good at this, but fail to scale to big trees and do not provide a nice overview.
The presented technique, while developed independently, is similar to Elastic Hierarchies, described in Zhao et al. 2005.