02.Apr 2009 Benjamin Wiederkehr Showcases , ,

Stacked Wedge

Tom Gonzalez has written an excellent post on how he’s come up with a new visualization method he’s calling Stacked Wedge Graph. The Stacked Wedge displays hierarchal data on a radial system. By splitting up the sectors of a simple Pie Chart and on different rings.

stacked_wedge_01

He argues that this approach was ignited by a client’s requirement he could not implement and still sustain the visual quality he stives for in his work. So the article is not just a great introduction in his thought on the Stacked Wedge but also on the collaboration with a client with already fixed ideas on the desired visualization method.

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  • http://neoformix.com Jeff Clark

    Tom suggested that this was likely done before and he is right, it has been done before. See http://neoformix.com/2006/MultiLevelPieChart.html for example or http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/sunburst/ . I called them ‘multi-level pie charts’ or ‘radial treemaps’. Tom’s example above is a great high quality rendering of the idea.

  • http://artillery.ch Benjamin Wiederkehr

    Jeff’s example reminded me of an applet I created during my own studies that used something similar. It’s a combination of a “Multi Dimensional Pie Chart” and a relation circle. I needed it to display the age of a package in software visualization. The documentation is here.

  • iynque

    There’s a program I’ve been using for years called FileLight (for linux and Mac OS). It shows contents of your hard drive in a chart like this, highest level of the file system is inside, and splits as files and folders divide up the space.

    It shows you visually just what is taking up all of your space AND where it resides.

  • http://artillery.ch Benjamin Wiederkehr

    Thanks for the hint iynque. For those interested in the application, it’s available at freshmeat.net.

  • http://twitter.com/1mrlee/statuses/1461132710 1mrlee (Mr_LeE)
  • Marcin Ignac

    Hi. I implemented similar concept for search results clustering one year ago. I added some nice interface to it though. You can expand/collapse subgroups and focus/zoom on them so deeper levels are more readable (we had up to four of them). This made it not only visualization but also exploration tool. Check it out here : http://vorg.pl/projects/2008/02/01/carrot2

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