This report describes an augmentation of cone trees with graphical and interaction technieques: usage-based filtering, animated zooming, hand-coupled rotation, fish-eye zooming, coalescing of distant nodes, texturing, effective use of color for depth cueing, and the applications of dynamic queries. It also enhances the usefulness of cone tree visualization for large hierarchies by all but eliminating clutter.
This technique of hierarchical information allows 100% utilization of the display space, while mapping the full hierarchy onto a rectangular region. This efficient use of space allows large hierarchies to be displayed in their entirety and facilitates the presentation of semantic information.
The essence of this scheme is to lay out the hierarchy in a uniform way on a hyperbolic plane and map this plane onto a circular display region. This approach makes components diminish is size as they move outwards, and the display allows an exponential growth in the number of components being viewed.