TreeCovery : Coordinated Dual Treemap Visualization for Exploring the Recovery Act
Visual Analytics Toolkit 12.2009
The project is accepted by
Government Information Quarterly and will be published soon.
Abstract
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dedicated $787 billion
to stimulate the US economy and mandated the release of the
data describing the exact distribution of that money. The dataset
is a large and complex one; one of its distinguishing features is
its bi-hierarchical structure, arising from the distribution of money
through agencies to specific projects and the natural aggregation
of awards based on location. To offer a comprehensive overview
of the data, a visualization must incorporate both these hierarchies.
We present TreeCovery, a tool that accomplishes this through the
use of two coordinated treemaps. The tool includes a number
of innovative features, including coordinated zooming and filtering
and a proportional highlighting technique across the two trees.
TreeCovery was designed to facilitate data exploration, and initial
user studies suggest that it will be helpful in insight generation.
RATB(Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board) has
tested TreeCovery and considering to include the concept into their
visual analytics.