Institute for Systems Research Technical Reports

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/4376

This archive contains a collection of reports generated by the faculty and students of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), a permanent, interdisciplinary research unit in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. ISR-based projects are conducted through partnerships with industry and government, bringing together faculty and students from multiple academic departments and colleges across the university.

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    Ordered and Quantum Treemaps: Making Effective Use of 2D Space to Display Hierarchies (2001)
    (2005) Bederson, Benjamin B.; Shneiderman, Ben; Wattenberg, Martin; ISR
    Treemaps, a space- filling method of visualizing large hierarchical data sets, are receiving increasing attention. Several algorithms have been proposed to create more useful displays by controlling the aspect ratios of the rectangles that make up a treemap. While these algorithms do improve visibility of small items in a single layout, they introduce instability over time in the display of dynamically changing data, fail to preserve order of the underlying data, and create layouts that are difficult to visually search. In addition, continuous treemap algorithms are not suitable for displaying quantum-sized objects within them, such as images. This paper introduces several new treemap algorithms, which address these shortcomings. In addition, we show a new application of these treemaps, using them to present groups of images. The ordered treemap algorithms ensure that items near each other in the given order will be near each other in the treemap layout. Using experimental evidence from Monte Carlo trials, we show that compared to other layout algorithms ordered treemaps are more stable while maintaining relatively favorable aspect ratios of the constituent rectangles. A second test set uses stock market data. The quantum treemap algorithms modify the layout of the continuous treemap algorithms to generate rectangles that are integral multiples of an input object size. The quantum treemap algorithm has been applied to PhotoMesa, an application that supports browsing of large numbers of images.
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    Domain Name Based Visualization of Web Histories in a Zoomable User Interface
    (2000) Gandhi, Rajiv; Kumar, Girish; Bederson, Benjamin B.; Shneiderman, Ben; ISR
    Users of hypertext systems like the World Wide Web (WWW) often find themselves following hypertext links deeper and deeper, only to become "lost" and unable to find their way back to the previouslyvisited pages. We have implemented a web browser companion called Domain Tree Browser (DTB) that builds a tree structured visual navigation history while browsing the web. The Domain Tree Browser organizes the URLs visited based on the domain name of each URL and shows thumbnails of each page in a zoomable window. A usability test was conducted with four subjects.