GoTreeScape: Navigate and Explore the Tree Visualization Design Space

IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2023 Dec;29(12):5451-5467. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3215070. Epub 2023 Nov 10.

Abstract

Declarative grammar is becoming an increasingly important technique for understanding visualization design spaces. The GoTreeScape system presented in the paper allows users to navigate and explore the vast design space implied by GoTree, a declarative grammar for visualizing tree structures. To provide an overview of the design space, GoTreeScape, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, projects the tree visualizations onto a 2D landscape. Significantly, this landscape takes the relationships between different design features into account. GoTreeScape also includes an exploratory framework that allows top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid modes of exploration to support the inherently undirected nature of exploratory searches. Two case studies demonstrate the diversity with which GoTreeScape expands the universe of designed tree visualizations for users. The source code associated with GoTreeScape is available at https://github.com/bitvis2021/gotreescape.