Here are a couple more experiments aimed at visually representing a large taxonomy.

Some time ago I looked at ways to visualize a medium-large taxonomy (approximately 3,000 terms) using one of the many visualization kits out there. It turned out that pretty much all of them can't handle that many terms, but there are other strategies that come in handy, such as hiding and revealing terms in the taxonomy based on the level you are looking at.

Why can't I see the whole thing on a single page? Because there are too many things to display - or so you'd think.

Step 1

Here's the entire set of elements on a page (well, sort of).

Can't we do better than that, though?

At the end of the day, if you assume a (quite modest these days) resolution of 800x600 pixels, you should be able to fit more than 300 9-point characters in there (assuming 9 points equal 12 pixels).

Step 2

Here's another way: a 7px font size and IDs instead of taxon labels make the visualization much more compact.

And it does fit in a single window - hurray!

One problem though: this is not very useful with all those meaningless numbers.

Step 3

So I tried to reduce the size a bit more to fit the entire taxon label in there.

Also, adding a bit of interactivity to reveal the hierarchy. The simple mechanism is this: when you click on an element of the taxonomy, all of its ancestors get highlighted too. Just to remember this is not a plain list of things, but a tree.

Kind of like this one :-)

Possible next steps

a) Adding arrows to make the hierarchical relationships more evident b) Some sort of summary below the subject term in focus c) Sorting the terms by hierarchy level rather than alphabetical order (will it make the taxonomy more intelligible?)

To be continued...