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A treemap is a visualization that has been specifically designed to facilitate the exploration of tree-structured data and, more general, hierarchically structured data. The family of visualization techniques that use a visual metaphor for parent-child relationships based "on the property of containment" (Johnson, 1993) is commonly referred to as treemaps. However, as the number of variations of treemaps grows, it becomes increasingly important to distinguish clearly between techniques and their specific characteristics. This paper proposes to discern between Space-filling Treemap T S , Containment Treemap T C , Implicit Edge Representation Tree T IE , and Mapped Tree T MT for classification of hierarchy visualization techniques and highlights their respective properties. This taxonomy is created as a hyponymy, i.e., its classes have an is-a relationship to one another: T S ⊂ T C ⊂ T IE ⊂ T MT . With this proposal, we intend to stimulate a discussion on a more unambiguous classification of treemaps and, furthermore, broaden what is understood by the concept of treemap itself.

No abstract