Data Reconstruction from Colored Slice-and-Dice Treemaps

Abstract

Treemaps illustrate hierarchical data, such as file systems or budget structures. Colors are often used to encode additional information or to emphasize the tree structure. Given a treemap, one may want to retrieve the underlying data. However, treemap reconstruction is challenging, as the inner tree structure needs to be derived almost exclusively from leaf node rectangles. Furthermore, treemaps are well known to suffer from ambiguities, i.e., different input data may produce the same drawing. We present a novel reconstruction approach for slice-and-dice treemaps. Moreover, we evaluate the influence of five color schemes to resolve ambiguities. Our work can be used for the reproducibility of published data and for assessing ambiguities in slice-and-dice treemaps.