Traditional representations of hiarchal information trees are very space consuming. There is a large amount of redundant information and padding to convey the tree structure.
Treemaps are representations of trees that use space-filling nested rectangles to convey the tree structure.
e.g., a directory tree:
2 ./CVS/Root
2 ./CVS/Repository
2 ./CVS/Entries
2 ./CVS/Entries.Log
10 ./CVS
2 ./Treemap/CVS/Root
2 ./Treemap/CVS/Repository
2 ./Treemap/CVS/Entries
2 ./Treemap/CVS/Entries.Log
.
.
.
(goes on for 80 lines)
e.g., a treemap of a directory tree:
.-------------------------------.
| ROOT |
|.-----------..-------..-------.|
||ImUgly.ttf ||Treemap|| CVS ||
|| ||.-----.|| ||
|| |||Input||| ||
|| ||| || >-----< |
|| || >---< ||example||
|| |||Outpu||| ||
|| ||`_____'|| ||
|`-----------'`-------'`-------'|
`-------------------------------'
Raster output is much more useful (like a GIF, or PNG) than ascii, as the labels are scaled appropriately, and alpha transparency is used to show information that would otherwise be hidden.
INSTALLATION
To install this module type the following:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
DEPENDENCIES
This module requires these other modules and libraries:
Imager
Currently we are only support freetype2 for labelling. Expect Treemap
to explode if you don't build Imager with freetype2 support.
XML::Simple
One pre-requisite it doesn't seem to include of it's own regard when
being installed is LWP::UserAgent
GOTCHAS
When using Treemap::Output::Imager, you may get the mysterious error
Can't call method "bounding_box" on an undefined value at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Treemap/Output/Imager.pm line 330.
What it's really saying is, "we couldn't find your true type font."
THE FUTURE
Output Modules: Postscript/PDF, Flash Input Modules: nntp
... and anything else we can build a tree hiarchy out of. Contributions welcomed!
COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
(c)2003 Simon P. Ditner <simon@uc.org>, and Eric P. Maki <eric@uc.org>
Original Treemap Concept: Ben Shneiderman <ben@cs.umd.edu>, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml
Squarified Treemap Concept: Visualization Group of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven