Patent ID: 8010575

Claim:
A system for redistributing interest in a hierarchical data structure representation, comprising: a processor, comprising: a display of a data representation of a hierarchical data structure comprising depth levels having one or more blocks of sibling nodes associated with node interest characteristics, wherein two or more of the sibling nodes are combined as aggregates into elided subsets; a selection module to select one of the elided subsets in one of the blocks and to expand the selected elided subset to reveal the aggregated sibling nodes; a breadth determination module to determine a breadth of the depth level in which the one block is located by summing a breadth associated with each block located in the depth level and to further determine that the depth level breadth exceeds a constrained breadth extent for the data representation; and an aggregation module to decrease the depth level breadth by recalculating the node interest characteristic for each node in the depth level, comprising: a node selection module to order the nodes in the depth level by their respective node interest characteristic, to identify the nodes with the lowest recalculated node interest characteristic, and to select a portion of the sibling nodes in the depth level for aggregation into one or more new elided subsets by removing the sibling nodes with the lowest node interest characteristic such that the breadth does not exceed the constrained breadth extent; and a node aggregation module to aggregate the removed sibling nodes that are located adjacent to one another in a common block into one of the new elided subsets and to position the nodes and the new elided subsets within the blocks.