Patent ID: 6976212

Claim:
A method for displaying hierarchical information, where the information can be represented as a set of nodes wherein each node is associated with a portion of the information and the nodes are connected by directed edges wherein a node has at most one incoming edge, a parent node is the source of an incoming edge, a child node is the target of an outgoing edge, a root node is a node with no incoming edge, a leaf node is a node with no outgoing edges, a path is a sequence of nodes having a first node and a last node, and each node except the last node is followed by one of its child nodes, and a full path is a path n wherein the root node is the first node of the path and a leaf node is the last node of the path, in a two-dimensional structure having a plurality of rows, each row having a height, and a plurality of columns, each column having a width comprising: a) generating a two-dimensional structure for containing cells associated with each node wherein the number of the plurality of rows equals the number of the nodes in the longest path, and the number of the plurality of columns equals the total number of the leaf nodes, and a cell associated with a parent node is a parent cell, a cell associated with a child node is a child cell, and a cell associated with a leaf node is a leaf cell, each cell having a width, b) designating a placement for each of the cells in a row n within the two-dimensional structure such that the parent cells of each cell are placed in a row n−1, child cells of each cell are placed in a row n+1, each leaf cell spans exactly one column, and each cell other than a leaf cell spans exactly the columns spanned by the child cells associated with that cell, and c) populating at least one cell with at least a portion of the information associated with the cell's associated node.