Mergemaps: treemaps for scientific data

Adhitya Kamakshidasan and Vijay Natarajan.
Topological Methods in Visualization VI: Theory, Software and Applications. Ingrid Hotz, Talha Bin Masood, Filip Sadlo, and Julein Tierny (Eds.) Springer-Verlag, Mathematics and Visualization Series, 2021, 19–38

Abstract

Topology driven methods for analysis of scalar fields often begin with an exploration of an abstract topological structure such as the merge tree. Such abstractions are hard to interpret and time-consuming, particularly for feature-rich data. Current visualization schemes often place less emphasis on enriching user experience, human perception, or interaction. In this work, we aim to bridge that gap by utilizing treemaps towards effective topological analysis. We present mergemaps, a treemap based interactive design, to better understand merge trees. To aid the perceptual understanding of large merge trees, we provide fusing and diffusing operations to reduce its hierarchical size while preserving topological features. We show multiple examples where our design leads to easy interpretations.

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