Innovation trajectories for information visualizations: Comparing treemaps, cone trees, and hyperbolic trees

This paper reviews the trajectory of three information visualization innovations: treemaps, conetrees, and hyperbolic trees. These three ideas were first published in the early 1990s, so we are able to track academic publications, patents, trade press articles over almost two decades. We describe the early history of each approach, problems with data collection from differing sources, appropriate metrics, and strategies for visualizing these longitudinal data sets. This paper makes two contributions: (1) it offers the information visualization community a history of how certain ideas evolved, influenced others, and were adopted for widespread use and (2) it provides example of how such trajectories of historical trends can be gathered and visualized. Guidance for innovators and future analysts is offered.