Dynamic visualization of hierarchical data

Many business data applications involve several hierarchies reflecting inherent structure of the underlying domains. Often, these hierarchies are presented in a spreadsheet like format, showing a single hierarchy in a tabular form with drill down and roll up capabilities. Although this approach works for simple hierarchies and small data sets, they tend to break as the hierarchies become more complex or the size of data set increases. An alternative approach, which has the potential to work equally well with complex hierarchies and large data sets, is to devise a visualization front-end for dynamically altering and displaying views of data under user control. Toward this end, we have developed a prototype of a visualization tool to view large financial data sets which typically involve multiple hierarchies. The tool not only acts as a data presentation medium, but also serves as a graphical means to form complex queries and interact with data. Its presentation structure uses hierarchical labels, which may be drilled down or rolled up, and displayable cell objects, which may have arbitrary complexity. Its data interface allows users to select data of interest, map data parameters to visual attributes, set threshold values to focus on interesting data, and read data values associated with cell objects.