To improve the perception of hierarchical structures in data sets, several color map generation algorithms have been proposed to take this structure into account. But the design of hierarchical color maps elicits different requirements to those of color maps for tabular data. Within this paper, we make an initial effort to put design rules from the color map literature into the context of hierarchical color maps. We investigate the impact of several design decisions and provide recommendations for various analysis scenarios. Thus, we lay the foundation for objective quality criteria to evaluate hierarchical color maps.

翻译：为提升数据集中层次结构的感知效果，已有多种考虑该结构的色彩映射生成算法被提出。但层次色彩映射的设计要求与表格数据色彩映射存在差异。本文首次尝试将色彩映射文献中的设计规则置于层次色彩映射的语境中进行探讨。我们研究了若干设计决策的影响，并为不同分析场景提供建议，从而为评估层次色彩映射的客观质量标准奠定基础。