A heuristic extending the Squarified treemapping algorithm

Abstract

A heuristic extending the Squarified Treemap technique for the representation of hierarchical information as treemaps is presented. The original technique gives high quality treemap views, since items are laid out with rectangles that approximate squares, allowing easy comparison and selection operations. New key steps, with a low computational impact, have been introduced to yield treemaps with even better aspect ratios and higher homogeneity among items.In this paper, we present a heuristic extending the Squarified Treemap technique, which aims to lay out hierarchical information by treemap having square-like rectangles. Before explaining how such technique has been improved, an overview about the Squarified procedure is given. Comparison tests and discussions about the obtained results will close the paper.