Treefoil: Visualization and Pair Wise Comparison of File-system Trees

Much work has been done to visualize single trees in various domains, including those of biology (taxonomy) genetics (genomics) and file systems. Much less attention has been paid to the pair-wise comparison of trees to find similarities and differences. We introduce a visualization tool, Treefoil, to perform pair-wise comparisons on large file system data. This tool is useful for systems administrators and web developers in particular but also to computer users in general. Our visualization technique presents an overview and detail interface, based on a dotplot for overview tasks and a dual pane file browser for the detail views. This paper outlines the design of our system, its implementation, and how it helps solves the problems associated with pair-wise comparison of hierarchical data structures