Circle Packing

Authors

• Hongan Wang
  
• Guozhong Dai
  
• Weixin Wang
  
• Hui Wang
  

Short description

Circle packing is a method to visualize large hierarchical data using nested circles. Inspired by treemaps and Grokker, Wang et al. developed a layout algorithm for tree structures which gives a good overview for large data sets. Tangent circles represent the brother nodes at the same level. The different leves are shown by nested circles (2D) or nested cylinders (3D). An advantage of this algorithm is the good overview for large data sets and it is easy to make out groupings and structural relationships.

[Wang, W. et al., 2006]

figures

The tree nodes at different levels are represented by nested circles. Brother nodes are packed into the root node. If a node has children they are packed into it.

3D nested cylinders and spheres

Userinterface: directories are represented by white circles.
The Color of the inner circles shows the filetype and the file sizes determine the radii.

Suitable Datatypes

Suitable Datatypes for this visualization technique are (large) hierarchical data structures.

Internal Links

• Treemap

References

[Wang, W. et al. 2006] Wang et al. Visualization of large hierarchical data by circle packing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, pages 517-520, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2006: ACM Press.