Treemap 4.1 Online Documentation Requirements Treemap 4.1 requires Java 1.4 Treemap has been developed on PCs. We used either Windows 2000 or XP and do not have the resources to make sure that Treemap works on every platform/version. We have heard that Treemap does run on some versions of Linux, Unix and Windows ME. Remember that Treemap will not work in environments that do not support Java 1.4 Known Problems To Get Started Real-time Video Streaming Downloadable Video OVERVIEW DEMONSTRATION Treemap Video Tutorial (8min 53 seconds, 6.5 MB) * See this if you are using a high speed internet Treemap Video Tutorial with file buffering (8min 53 seconds, 6.5 MB) * See this if you are using a dialup modem TABLE OF VIDEO DEMO Table of short task-oriented video demonstrations User Manual Title Text and Picture Documentation Quick Demo Example Data Introduction Introduction How to interpret a Treemap (1 min, 800KB) Basketball statistics Creating your own Treemap Create your own TM3 data file Create your own XML data file Flexible Hierarchy (i.e. creating a hierarchy based on a series of attributes) Create a Treemap with flexible hierarchy (40 seconds, 580KB) Dealing with an imposed hierarchy (50 seconds, 740KB) More examples of flexible hierarchy (1 min 15seconds, 760KB) Basketball statistics 43 Causes of death Projects of a company Saving Settings Save Settings and Create your own BATCH file Save settings (15 seconds, 140KB) Basketball statistics Changing the Layout Parameters Changing the Layout Parameters (algorithm, size, color, labels, borders), and Keyboard Shortcuts Choose layout algorithm (17 seconds, 220KB) Color, size and label attribute (24 seconds, 260KB) Basketball statistics Basketball statistics Treemap 4.1 Documentation http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/doc4.1/toc.html 1 of 2 6/3/2011 10:48 AM
Transcript
Treemap 4.1 Online Documentation
Requirements
Treemap 4.1 requires Java 1.4
Treemap has been developed on PCs. We used either Windows 2000 or XP and do not have the resources tomake sure that Treemap works on every platform/version. We have heard that Treemap does run on some
versions of Linux, Unix and Windows ME. Remember that Treemap will not work in environments that do not
support Java 1.4
Known Problems
To Get Started
Real-time Video Streaming Downloadable Video
OVERVIEW
DEMONSTRATION
Treemap Video Tutorial (8min 53 seconds, 6.5 MB)
* See this if you are using a high
speed internet
Treemap Video Tutorial withfile buffering
(8min 53 seconds, 6.5 MB)
* See this if you are using a dialup
modem
TABLE OF VIDEO DEMO Table of short task-oriented video demonstrations
User Manual
Title Text and PictureDocumentation
Quick Demo Example Data
Introduction Introduction
How to interpret a
Treemap (1 min, 800KB)
Basketballstatistics
Creating your
own Treemap
Create your own TM3 data file
Create your own XML data file
Flexible Hierarchy (i.e. creating a hierarchy based
on a series of attributes)
Create a Treemap with
flexible hierarchy
(40 seconds, 580KB)
Dealing with an imposed
hierarchy
(50 seconds, 740KB)
More examples of flexible
hierarchy
(1 min 15seconds, 760KB)
Basketballstatistics
43 Causes ofdeath
Projects of acompany
Saving SettingsSave Settings and Create yourown BATCH file
Treemap is a space-filling visualization for hierarchical structures. It is particularly effective in revealing attributes of leaf
nodes using size and color coding. Treemaps enable users to compare sizes of nodes and of sub-trees, and can reveal
patterns and exceptions.
We HIGHLY recommend that you read the history of Treemaps page, maintained by Ben Shneiderman, to learn more aboutthe various layout algorithms and applications of treemap. Of course, we also recommend that you read the papers
Main Tab: to choose algorithm, font size, and borders
The Layout Algorithms
Treemap implements three Layout Algorithms:
Slice And Dice - Stable and ordered, but poor aspect ratio. It can generate long skinny rectangles,but is very good to compare sets of items side by side. Note the "flip slice and dice option".
Squarified - Best aspect ratios, Unordered, medium stability. The nodes will move when the sizechanges.
Strip - Ordered, pretty good aspect ratios with some exception, medium stability. The nodes move,but not as often as in Squarified Algorithm.
You will find that the best choice of algorithm depends largely on your data and task, so try all three
versions using the menu in the "Main" tab.
Note that in all the cases, nodes that have a size of zero will not appear on the screen, and that subtrees
that have too many nodes to be drawn will appear black because the 1 pixel border drawn to separate
nodes are black.
Label font size: Making the size = 0, hides the labels but their values remain visible on the cursor activated popup
window.
Border padding: This padding helps see the grouping of nodes in subtrees, but pixels are "lost" with this padding. Soreducing the size of the padding may reveal more nodes. Reducing the font size also helps regain pixels.
Hide borders: will remove ALL borders and padding so that every pixel is dedicated to the painting of nodes. But
watch out that adjacent nodes of the same color will appear to be merged. Turning this control on and off several
times is helpful to gain an understanding of the structure of the treee and see details as well.
Restore default settings in Treemap: simply reloads the file you last opened
Legend Tab: To choose size, color, and label attributes
Label attribute: By selecting "None", all labels will be removed, but you might prefer to set the font size to zero so
that the pop-up still displays some information about the node.
Size attribute: Only numerical attributes will appear in this option box. If the attribute has negative values they will be
handled as zero, i.e. the node will not be visible (we plan to offer alternative options such as using the absolute value
Color attribute: If you choose a numerical attribute, a color legend and color binning panel will appear. For more
information, see Color Binning for Numerical Attributes.
Linear, Square Root, or Logarithmic options: those are helpful to gain a quick understanding of the data when the
distribution is very skewed.
Color aggregation functions: average, minimum, maximum, and weighted average. This specifies what aggregation
function should be used for the current color attribute when the lower levels of the tree are aggregated using the topslider in the filter tab panel. For more information, see Aggregate the Lower Levels of the Tree in the filteringdocumentation page.
Keyboard Shortcuts: To support keyboard navigation
The mnemonics for all the menu options are available and are underlined. For example, for file menu, alt+f will make
the file menu selected, then 'o' for file open, 'd' directory mapping etc.
The keyboard shortcuts are displayed on the menus.
Some of the shortcuts that are not displayed are:
"Enter" - zooming in the tree
"Esc" - Zooming out the tree for the selected node
"F1" - help, will give the quick reference for the treemap documentation.
"Up Arrow" - highlights the parent node for the selected node.
Color Setting and Binning for Numerical Attributes
.
Overview
The color setting widget serves as a color legend, a histogram showing the distribution of values, and a data entry
widget to set ranges (i.e. bins) of values and assign them different colors.
The minimum and maximum value on the axis is determined by the minimum and maximum value of the data visible
on the Treemap (i.e.if data has been filtered out, then the widget is "zoomed" on the current values.
"Lock the number of bins" is useful to avoid adding more bins by mistake while pointing at the color legend. It is
enabled only when the User Defined Bins option is selected.
Binning options
Equally Spaced Bins - Equally Dense Bins
The placement of the bin separators is calculated automatically, but you can set the number of bins.Either use the up/down arrows or type the number yourself. The number of bins has to be between 1 and20.
You can change the color of bins but not the min and max values.
User Defined Bins
LEFT-CLICK where you want a NEW bin separator to be added
RIGHT-CLICK on a separator blue arrow to DELETE a separator
CLICK and DRAG on the blue arrow to MOVE a bin separator (or you can edit min and max values by
clicking on their value box)
Once you lock the number of bins, you will not be able to add any bins (but it is possible to delete the
bins).
This is the default option when the data has both negative and positive values, and is set to have zero asthe two bin separation value
To select different colors
When you click on the "MIN" or "MAX" button, a color picker will appear for you to select colors. When bins are
small and hard to highlight with the cursor, you can cycle through the bins by clicking on the "Previous" and "Next"
We tried to provide some useful DEFAULT colors but realized there were so many different special cases, so we
"gave up"... for now. So the default colors go from green to yellow to red and then just give "useful" defaults that youhave to set yourself.
To change the min and max values
Click on the buttons below the min and max buttons showing the VALUES themselves, or click on the values in thelegend/histogram.
TIPS for setting your colors
It is not always easy... we could have spend many more days creating the perfect color widget but we had to stop
somewhere. This widget will allow you to do pretty much anything you want with a bit of patience.
Don't forget to save the settings once in a while so that you can recover from mistakes.
To see the widget in more detail, you can make the treemap smaller and the control panel larger by dragging the
window separator to the left. This will give more width to the color widget, thus, making it more readable and
selectable.
When the bins you need are very close together (often the case for very skewed data):
First decide on the number of bins you will need.
Create Equally Spaced Bins.
Choose your colors by selecting colors for each bin range.
Switch to User Defined Bins.
Edit the numerical values of min and max (by clicking on the values below min and max or in the
legend/histogram itself).
In last resort, if you need to see the legend in more details, you can "zoom" on the legend by using the filters to filterthe data itself. Once you have clicked on "Hide Filtered", the legend will be zoomed to show only the remaininguseful range.
To zoom in, double click on the desired node or subtree border (or hit "Enter").
To zoom out, single right click. If you have difficulty zooming in or out, it might be because your mouse is toosensitive and moves while you click (or hit "Esc").
To show details with popup: As you move the mouse over the Treemap, a yellow line will indicate which node the
mouse is over. In addition, a pop-up box will appear indicating the node's name, the attribute values Treemap iscoloring and sizing by, and the depth of the node.
To show more details: click on the node and the list of all its attribute values will appear in the upper right window.
Remember to scroll if you do not see what you are looking for. You can also resize the window by dragging the
window separators.
To show the path:When you click on a node, all the parents of the node are highlighted with a gradient of fading
colors. The path of the node is also shown in the detail window at the bottom of the table (don't forget to scroll). Itwill be split in several lines to avoid supor long labels that would make the whole table scrollable. If the highlighted ofthe path on the treemap uses a color that conflict with your color scheme, you can change it by using the "Set Path
Highlighting Color" option of the "Option" menu of the menu bar.
Some data is best presented with a fixed hierarchy. For example, census data falls nicely in a hierarchy of country,
states, counties, and blocks which could not be rearranged. Some other data could be rearranged using varioushierarchies based on the attributes available. For example, if you have health data provided for the 2 sexes, 3 racesand 5 age groups, you could present the data in a variety of ways. One example would be by separating men andwomen at the 1st level, then splitting by race at the second level and then by age. Another hierarchy could be to splitby age first, then sex, then race. Flexible hierarchies let you specify the order you want those attributes to be used
when creating the hierarchy.
Hierarchy tab: to create hierarchies
If the data file you are using has a default hierarchy (see creating your own data file), you can 1st remove the default
hierarchy. All nodes will appear together on the treemap without any hierarchy. Now you can create you ownhierarchy.
Choose from the list of available attributes (at the bottom), then click on the "Add" button and the attribute will be
added in the Hierarchy List.
Attributes that have only a few values (e.g. sex or race) make good hierarchy attributes. Other like "age" need to have
their values grouped in bins to split the tree nicely, e.g. you can split between young and old people by binning the age
attribute into 2 bins. TO BIN an ATTRIBUTE: click on the right most cell of the corresponding hierarchy attribute
table.
For details and tips on using the binning widget please refer to the section on User Defined Bins in Color Binning forNumerical Attributes.
To remove an attribute, select the attribute and click on the "Remove" button.
You will find that it is better to use put the last/bottom attribute as the label attribute and remove it from the hierarchy
definition.
You can create different permutations of the attributes in the Hierarchy List by using the "Up" and "Down", or "auto"
to permute automatically and review the many options. Treemap redraws the tree as you change the hierarchy.
Once you are happy with a hierarchy you can give it a name (by typing a new name where it says "hierarchy 1") and
you can use the "New" button to create another hierarchy. Remember to save the settings as well!
Example of Flexible Hierarchy
Open the "election.tm3" file and color by the attribute "Party in 2000". This shows which states voted for who in the
last presential election. Changing one of the two colors will make things more readable.
This file has a default hierarchy of states within regions, but now you can go the newly added "Hierarchy" tab
window and add levels in the hierarchy.
For example, you can select the attribute "Party in 1996" from the list of attributes and then click on "Add".
The hierarchy now has an additional level, and regroups all the states that voted for Democrats and those who voted
for Republicans.
If you now select "Party in 1996" in the hierarchy and click on "Move Up", this particular attribute will be at the top
level of the hierarchy.
Next, remove the attribute "Party in 1996" from the hierarchy (by selecting it in the hierarchy and clicking on
"Remove").
Add the attribute "Population" in the hierarchy. Since it is a numerical attribute, there is no natural grouping. Thebottom binning widget shows the distribution of the values.
Take a look at the hierarchy panel for the attribute "Population". It says 49 (for 49 values) and "No binning".
No binning is actually a drop down box with different options, namely, Equally Spaced Bins, Equally Dense Bins, and
You can save the hierarchies you created, layout options, zoom level, label, size and color choices and filtering options
by using Save Settings.
Select Save Settings in the File menu.
Select the same directory as the corresponding data input file (.tm3 or .xml) is in. Data input files and tms files can besaved to and loaded from any accessible directory as long as the tms files are in the same directory as their
corresponding data input files.
Choose a file name. The default name is the same name as the data input file. The extension ".tms" will automatically
be added at the end of the file.
This .tms file contains the settings and a reference to the data input file it corresponds to.
You can now open the .tms file to load the data and apply the settings automatically.
The following settings are NOT saved:
The nodes that were hidden will appear as gray in the reloading the settings of the .tms file. This way you will be ableto see which nodes were filtered out, and apply "Hide filtered nodes" to remove then. If this is a problem, you can use
the Export function of the file menu to create a new datafile.
Having Problems with Save Settings?
Common Errors experienced by several users:
Make sure you open the *.tms file and not the *.tm3 file. The tms file includes a pointer to the tm3 data and loads it
with the correct settings. This allows saving several settings for the same data file.
If you are using any version prior to Treemap 4.0, save settings will not work. You have to save the new settingsentirely as the format has changed and the old settings files are not updated properly. Start from the tm3 file, set the
controls as you want, and save the settings as a *.tms file.
Create your own BATCH file
Suppose, you wish to create My.BAT file.
Go to NotePad, select "Save As" option from the "File" menu. Then type "My.BAT" and click "Save". Make sure tohave the "My.BAT" within double quotes (") as they are required to correctly save this file as Batch format. You can
use any text editor to effectively create your own BATCH file, however, remember to include the double quotes (").
The commands that should be put into the BATCH file:
java -jar TreemapProgram.jar command line argumentsThe input files don't have to be in the "data" directory any more. (See the link for command line arguments.)
Note: Treemap does not support the .tm2 format any longer.
Treemap uses a very simple TAB-delimited format that includes both the attributes values and the tree structure. You can
create the data with a spreadsheet, or export it from a database.
Standard Treemap file including a default hierarchy
Creating a new Treemap file with a spreadsheet program:
On the first row of the spreadsheet, put all the attribute labels for your data, placing one label per cell. For
example, to create a data file on traffic information (as seen above), you would put "Length (miles)" in the firstcell, "Traffic Lights" in the next cell, "Speed Limit" in the third cell, and "Repairs per week" in the fourth cell.
In the next row, put the type of each attribute data. Data can be of type FLOAT, INTEGER, DATE, or
STRING. Data types must be typed in UPPERCASE letters. In the traffic example, one would have "FLOAT"in the first cell of the second row, "INTEGER" in the second, "INTEGER" in the third, and "FLOAT" in the
fourth.
NOTE: If the attribute type is DATE, then the format should be MM/DD/YYYY. Please do not add anyother values like time or day along with the date value. Make sure you enter the data values using the
above mentioned date pattern only.
Fill in the values for each attribute for an item, placing one item per row. After all the attribute values are
filled, include one blank column. After the blank column, list the hierarchy path starting with the name of the
root. For example, "Roads" would be in the first cell after the blank column, "Highway" in the second, and
"Route 1" in the last cell. (Note that the leaves of the tree do not need to be at the same depth.)
Now save the file as a tab-delimited text file, such as, traffic.txt. The file is now ready to be loaded by
Treemap, but we like to rename the data file with an .tm3 extension to identify them as treemap datafiles.Rename the data so the extension is .tm3 instead of .txt.
After loading the .tm3 file, you can change the Legend for Color to "Location" from the control panel oftreemap, which is a column containing controls on the right hand side.
The picture below shows how Treemap looks like after loading the created file, traffic.txt (or traffic.tm3) and
applying several settings from the control panel. (If you don't do anything after you load the file, all cells willappear as white because the default Legend for Color is "(None)".)
If you apply some settings after loading a .tm3 file, you can save them. See Save Settings.
Simplified format for use with the flexible hierarchy
If you do no want to - or need to - include a hierarchy in the treemap because it can be created with the flexible
hierarchy, simply omit to include a hierarchy in the file. The firearm.tm3 file is an example of such file.
Treemap will pick the first string attribute as default attribute for labeling (the default labeling being usually thelast string of the path definition found in the data file for each node.
Common Problems
If your newly created Treemap file does not load correctly it could be caused by one of the following problems.
Make sure you have no empty values in your attribute data table.1.
Excel sometimes adds extra white space if you move your cursor to areas outside your data, or replace cells that oncehad information with white space when deleted. This causes a problem with Treemap. To remedy this, open your file
in excel. Select all of your data, but only your data. DO NOT SELECT ANY OUTSIDE BLANK CELLS. Select the
copy command. Then open a new spreadsheet and paste the information you had selected. Now without changing or
exploring the data save the file as a tab delimited text file and the white space should be gone.
2.
Make sure that INTEGERs are really integers.3.
Make sure that DATEs have the format MM/DD/YYYY.
If they have other formats than this, you can change it in Excel.
Open the file in Excel.1.
Click on the column's letter (e.g. G) to select the whole column with the different date format.2.
From the menu, select Format and then Cells.3.
From the Category: select Date.4.
Choose the type that conforms to MM/DD/YYYY (e.g. 3/14/1998).5.
4.
If you have nodes with negative values for the attribute you chose for map to size, those nodes will not be shown.5.
Remember that there may not be enough pixels to show every node in your tree. Make the window size bigger, use
zooming and filtering to limit the number of nodes shown, remove the borders, and of course set the size attribute tofit the characteristic of the nodes you care about and want to see.
If you try to open your .tm3 file with Excel and it complains that your file has an invalid SYLK file format, thismeans that the first 2 characters of the file is "ID". One way to avoid this problem is to change the case, such as "Id".Read more about SYLK file format problem at Microsoft support.
Treemap uses the simple XML format designed for the data set in the IV03 contest .The simple XML format for the IV03 contest is specified in treeml.dtd.The sample tree is also provided under data/ directory in the Treemap bundle you download. (Actually there isa slight modification in terms of the location of the .dtd file, i.e. the DOCTYPE line.)
You need to have treeml.dtd in the same directory as your XML files if the DOCTYPE line in your .xml file
looks like:
<!DOCTYPE tree SYSTEM "treeml.dtd">
You don't need to have treeml.dtd locally at all, if the DOCTYPE line in your .xml file has an absolute
reference:
<!DOCTYPE tree SYSTEM "http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/iv03contest/datasets
Treemap is not a realtime visualization system but you can still use Treemap to monitor data on a regular basis by
reloading the data file every once in a while.
In the "Options" menu of the Treemap window, select "Reload Data File". You will be asked to input the number ofseconds between reload, and whether or not you want a warning before every reload (otherwise the data can be
reloaded and cancel your current exploration (zoom, filter etc.)
If you loaded a "tms" settings file originally (which is most likely), it will reload the same tms file which will triggers a
reload of the data file.
Of course, as you reload the file, the data ranges may have changed. Treemap will detect out of range values, give a
warning and adapt the widgets automatically. To have more control over what happens we recommend that you createa test file (possibly edited by hand) that includes extreme values for all attributes. You can pick colors for the extrem
values and save the settings. Note that Treemap will only show the colors corresponding to the range of data in the
data file, so when your treemap is looking at data in the normal range it will not show the legend for extreme or
NetViz is the abbreviation for Network Visualization and this abbreviation is commonly used in Treemap. This featureallows to have links between leaf nodes. Those links are stored in a .tnv file (stands for treemap netviz file). The format oftnv files are defined below.
The NetViz feature is special in that there are no arrows to indicate incoming and outgoing links. Instead, the curvature of
the link is used to determine that. The curve is nearer to the source node.
A .tnv file depends on leaf nodes that Treemap shows just before loading it (the .tnv file). Steps to visualize the links are as
follows:
(Suppose our data input file is a .tm3 file.)
Make sure you have a .tm3 file and a corresponding .tnv file.1.
Open the .tm3 file.2.
Select File->Import NetViz Table from the menu.3.
Open the .tnv file that corresponds to this .tm3 file.4.
Under Options menu either choose Enable global Netviz feature to view all links or Enable under cursorNetViz feature to view the links that are related to one node at a time. Position the mouse over a node and you willsee all incoming and outgoing links of that node.
5.
Color of links
The color of all links are RED by default. If you want to base the color of a link on a nominal attribute of the target node, go
to the Legend Tab in Control Panel and choose the attribute you want to be effective from the "Link Color" combo box.This combo box will appear only when necessary, that is whenever a .tnv file is loaded or whenever a directory is mapped
during which automatic generation of NetViz links is requested. When you load a new file, since there will be no NetVizlinks associated, the combo box will disappear.
The format of .tnv files
.tnv files are TAB delimited text files that can be opened by or generated in Excel.
For an input data file to have a corresponding .tnv file (or .tnv files), the input data must have an attribute that has a uniquevalue for every node. We call an attribute having this property a key attribute. If you create a key attribute, it is stronglyrecommended that you choose its type as STRING.
The first line of a .tnv file has the name of a key attribute, which should appear exactly the same as in the data input file.
Every other line in the file represents the links as follows: The first column of every line has the source node's key attribute
value and the remaining columns have the target nodes' that the source node connects to.
Name
A B D E
C A B
.tnv file example
In this example, the name of the key attribute is "Name". A has outgoing links to B, D and E; while C hasoutgoing links to A and B.
Automatic Generation of NetViz Links As Mapping a directory
When mapping a directory, you have the choice of automatically generating NetViz links. (See Directory Mapping to learnwhere this choice appears.) All .html, .shtml, .htm files (case of extension doesn't matter) will be examined for HREF andSRC tags and as long as the references can be found under the directory that is mapped, NetViz links will be generated from
those files to the nodes representing references.
After mapping a directory to generate NetViz links, it is a good idea to go to the Legend Tab (in Control Panel) and set the
"Size" legend to "NONE". This setting leads to a clearer appearance of NetViz links.
Treemap started to have so many features that it might be too complex for different users. Especially beginners may have ahard time to find where to start. Treemap now allows you to exclude some features. The whole concept is called the feature
set (the set of all features you can exclude or include.)
By default, all features are included in Treemap. These features consist of:
menu items like File->Open
Attribute table, which is located on the top right hand side
Tabs (and items inside) in Control Panel, which spans the middle and bottom on the right hand side
You can create your own feature set, edit and save an existing one, simply apply an existing feature set, and delete anexisting feature set. After you go to Options menu and select Select UI Feature Set, the "Select Feature Set" dialogbox will appear which shows the available feature sets as a list of items (their names).
To edit an existing feature set, press Edit button, select or deselect the features you want from the dialog that appears andthen "Save" them by pressing Save in the "Treemap Features" dialog box.
To view what features are available in a feature set, you can simply press Edit and later Cancel in "Treemap Features"dialog box.
To create a new feature set, press New. All features will be selected in the dialog that appears. You can simply deselect thefeatures you don't want and then save it by pressing Save button.
To delete a feature set, select the feature set you want to delete from the list displayed in the dialog box, and then press
Delete.
To apply a feature set, select the feature set you want to apply from the list displayed in the dialog box, and then press
Apply.
The feature sets are kept as files in the system under features/ directory. Although we strongly discourage you doing that, ifyou are an expert user, and delete those files (or add new ones) without using Treemap, you may want to press Refreshbutton to update the list of available feature sets. Treemap is robust in that if a feature set becomes unavailable, and youselect it from the list to do something with it (Apply, Edit) the list will be automatically refreshed, so you will see that the
feature set you selected will disappear because it doesn't exist any more.
This feature allows you to display a Treemap of all the files in a directory.
Select "File" from the menu bar and click on "Map Directory" from the file menu.
Click on the directory that you wish to map, then press "Map Selected".
To map an entire hard drive, type the letter of the drive followed by a ":\", for example "C:\" would map the entire C
drive.
WARNING: We have mapped directories of more than 160,000 files, but the limit is a function of the memoryavailable, the memory allocated to java, the depth of the hierarchy etc. We have not focused on optimizing Treemapfor large trees.
Beginning from Treemap 4.1, it is possible to automatically generate NetViz links by mapping a directory (seeNetwork Visualization for more details.). Since it takes time to generate links, you will be asked whether you wantTreemap to do this processing ("Do you want NetViz links to be extracted from html files?"). Depending on your
answer, the number of steps differ (4 if "Yes", 3 if "No"). In both cases, step 1 counts the files and collects path
information for every file under the selected directory. Step 2 looks at attributes for every file (file age, file type, filesize). Step 3 will generate NetViz links if "Yes" was the response to the question above. In both cases, settings (such
as color of nodes in accordance with their file type attribute) are applied in the last step.
Coloring by attribute type:We selected some default colors for common file types, but you can change those colors
or add new ones, then save the settings.
Save Settings: For the settings to be used with any directory you want to map, the settings have to be saved as"Directory_Settings.tms", the default name proposed by the dialog box. This file must always be in the data folder. If
not, directory mapping will not work. Enter another name for the .tms file such as "mydir.tms" if you want Treemap to
save settings for this particular map of the selected directory. Treemap will automatically create a corresponding .tm3
file (in this case "mydir.tm3") to save the data, and then save the settings into the .tms file, which you entered the
name of (in this case, "mydir.tms"). The resulting .tms file is not any different than .tms files that are created upon
loading an input data file. Just in the same way, opening this .tms file will have the effect of loading the corresponding
.tm3 file and applying the settings found in the .tms file.
Note that this behavior (for directory mapping data) is effective since Treemap 4.1. Prior to that, a .tms file fordirectory mapping data would behave differently, much like as a shortcut that remaps the same directory (as opposedto loading an input data file, such as a .tm3 file) and applies the settings found in the .tms file. This behavior no longer
We have not focused on optimizing Treemap for very large data files, and chose instead to improve the functionalities
of Treemap. Nevertheless we can say that Treemap was successfully used in the following cases:
Mapping a directory comprising of 54,000 files with 20 levels.
Data Files with 25,000 nodes along with 8-9 attributes.
The size of the tree you can display with Treemap will also depend on the amount of memory allocated to runTreemap. In some cases it might help to increase the maximum memory allocated to Java heap size. This is done in
the command line that starts Treemap by adding the "-Xmxm" parameter. For example to set the max memory for
Treemap to be 256M, change the run.bat file to look like this:
java -Xmx256M -jar Treemap.jar
If you don't specify a maximum size, then the default maximum size is taken as 64M. If Treemap doesn't have enoughmemory, it will display a message indicating that it is out of memory.
(Note: Since Treemap 4.1 out of memory errors are handled more smoothly than earlier versions. For this reason, theuse of log files has been discontinued.)
If you are dealing with extremely large trees, you might want to look at this project: Visualizing a million items, andalso look at the results of the InfoVis Contest 2003.
You may have the following command line arguments when you run Treemap.
-i input fileinput file can be either a data input file (.tm3/.xml) or a .tms file. If it is a .tms file, the corresponding data input filemust be located in the same directory as the .tms file. Treemap will open this file as soon as it starts up.Example: java -jar treemap.jar -i census.tm3
-n node to highlightIf this argument is used, -i input file has to be used, too. On the opened input file, the node with the label node tohighlight will be highlighted. (If the label is not unique, the first one found will be highlighted.)Example: java -jar treemap.jar -i election.tm3 -n Maryland
-d directoryYou give the directory to map as an argument such as C:\Temp. If you use this argument, you cannot use -i input file.Or else, this argument will be ignored and input file will be opened instead.Example: java -jar treemap.jar -d C:\Temp
-f feature setYou give the name of the feature set you want. When Treemap starts up, only the selected features in feature set willbe present.
Example: java -jar treemap.jar -f expert
These command line arguments can be used together in any order as long as they satisfy the conditions discussed above. The
same kind of command line argument should not be provided again as in java -jar treemap.jar -i election.tm3 -icensus.tm3. Or else, the last command line argument will be used and the earlier ones (of the same kind) will be allignored.
You can edit run.bat and add the command line arguments there to avoid typing the command line arguments every time you
run Treemap, especially if you happen to use the same arguments frequently.
