Treemap

Treemap (as described by: Brief HCI Glossary for CS 3724):

A visualization technique in which hierarchical information is displayed within nested rectangles, with each level of nesting corresponding to a level of hierarchical decomposition.

License

TTreemap is open source and use an infoware license.

Infoware means the component is free as long users send an email stating that they are using it and for what purpose to the author. You can easily send this message from the contact us page.

My Description

Ok if your like me that statement makes no sense what so ever. In case you don't know its a way of visualizing a root-node tree to see what areas are taking up the most weight.

Thats still a bit confusing, but think of it this way. If you looked at your hard drive the files (and folders) that take up the most space would be drawn as the largest. With anything held inside of these areas being drawn inside of them. Thus allowing you to quickly look at a simple rectangular screen and tell exactly what files are largest.

History thus far

A posting on the b.p.d.tpt.g ng (or borland.public.delphi.thirdpartytools.general News Group) asking about these things made me start looking into them. The idea (and the algorythm to implement it) are quite simple. I wrote a quick crash app that could display a very simple network just to see how hard it would be. From their I started thinking of things that I would do with this type of view. Hard drive views, Network traffic views, Database record population details, Neural Network overhead and node displays, heck just about any analysys of a tree architecture would fit. So next thing I know I'm writing a very generic component to display Treemap's from any data source (thou you have to tell it how to read the data source). So here it is, from a simple question on the NG to me spending a few hours to wrap it all up.

In case your interested in where all my information came from I got it here Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies by Ben Shneiderman. Their is alot to read, and alot more to browse and view. I'll leave the actual details and history to that page to display.

Help files

Their is the start of a help file included in the package. As time goes by I'll do my best to add to this and hopefully some day we will have a complete help system :).

Click here to download