From Success Stories in Scientific Visualization Wiki
The Map of the Market, launched in 1998 to show stock market data on the web, is an example of visualization for the mass market rather than for specialists in a specific scientific domain. Many people and companies are extremely interested in understanding this large, publicly available dataset with complex structure at multiple levels of detail. Each colored rectangle in the map represents an individual company, the rectangle’s size reflects the company’s market capitalization and the color shows price performance. This treemap technique was originally introduced in 1991, and has been steadily refined by many researchers to increase its effectiveness and scalability. It has been successfully applied to many kinds of hierarchical data including digital image collections, baseball statistics, gene ontologies, and election results. One of the remaining visualization challenges is to better communicate the time-varying aspect of the data; the image above shows the change over a single time period, whereas the full dataset contains many time steps. Showing the combination of hierarchical structure and dynamic patterns over multiple time scales will require the development of new techniques.
M. Wattenberg, "Visualizing the stock market," CHI Extended Abstracts, pp 188-189, 1999.
