Polyarchy visualization: visualizing multiple intersecting hierarchies

Hierarchy visualization has been a hot topic in the Information Visualization community for the last decade. An emerging new information structure is multiple intersecting hierarchies, which we call Polyarchies. This structure emerged while creating common interfaces, called Metadirectories, to multiple databases in an enterprise. Visualizing polyarchies is challenging both as a design problem and as a system architecture problem, but enables use of novel views for discovery of relationships which are very difficult using existing hierarchy visualization tools. This paper will describe the challenges as well as our current solutions. A Mid-Tier Cache architecture is used for a polyarchy server which supports a novel web-based polyarchy visualization technique, called Visual Pivot.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: CHI
• Authors: George G. Robertson, Kim Cameron, Mary Czerwinski, Daniel C. Robbins
• Keywords: CHI 2002, Hierarchy Visualization Tools, Human Computer Interaction, Information Visualization Community, Polyarchy Visualization Technique