K. Cole-McLaughlin and V. Pascucci (USA)
The Contour Tree of a scalar field is the graph obtained by contracting all the connected components of the level sets of the field into points. This is a powerful abstraction for representing the structure of the field with explicit de scription of the topological changes of its level sets. It has proven effective as a data-structure for fast extraction of isosurfaces and its application has been advocated as a user interface component guiding interactive data exploration sessions. We propose a new metaphor for visualizing the Contour Tree borrowed from the classical design of a mechanical orrery (see Figure 1(a)) reproducing a hierarchy of orbits of the planets around the sun or moons around a planet. In the toporrery (see Figure 1(b)) the hierarchy of stars, planets and moons is replaced with a hierarchy of maxima, minima and saddles that can be interactively filtered, both uniformly and adaptively, by importance with respect to a given metric.
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