Displaying hierarchical tree-like designs in windows

Details Displaying hierarchical tree-like designs in windows Displaying hierarchical tree-like designs in windows

1989-10-30

1993-11-16

Hjerpe, Richard

Communications: electrical

Digital comparator systems

395160, G09G 500

Patent

active

052627616

ABSTRACT:
Design tools typically require representation of tree-like structures. These structures may be represented at various levels of refinement (or conversely, of abstraction). Existing methods of displaying different levels of a design involve either outlining methods which lack perceptual unity and/or obscure essential process considerations or the use of different windows (e.g., overlapping rectangular areas) which obscure essential relationships among the levels. FLOWforms.TM. (Scandura, 1987) have some of the requisite properties but it is not obvious how they map into various programming languages or how they might be constructed automatically in real time. Disclosed herein is a process for displaying arbitrary numbers of different levels of a design which apply equally to data and process and which automatically represent such relationship in proper visual context. This process shows how various configurations of rectangular regions can be constructed and embedded within one another to automatically refine each data or process element (represented by a rectangular region or box-like "window") to display desired information in a limited display area in precisely the proper context without increasing the contextual scale. During expansion, each such region or window is replaced by a larger region containing a structured, distinctive configuration of regions of the original size. Such configurations represent the refinement. Optionally, at the top of the embedding region are the contents of the original region set off by an easily distinguishable border.

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