In this folder, you will find the directory.pjd project, which contains preset visualizations meant to help you visualize your hard drive or some folders in new and interesting ways. As an example, we show the ILOG Discovery installation directory and its contents. You are invited to reuse these views with your own data, as explained at the end of this page.

The project defines a number of views, each suited to a particular task:

Files and directories

What you see

This view can work as an alternative to a file explorer, where you can see many more levels of the hierarchy and get a sense of how the directory structure is organized.

For instance, in this view, you see that most files in the distribution are in the doc hierarchy, and they are mostly html and htm files (purple and green).

What you can do

• Navigate in the hierarchy to view the various levels, like in a file explorer. As you focus in, you see more details at each level.
• Set some tooltips (using View > View Options...) to view the file names as you move the cursor.
• Change color and sort to modified or size to view where the recently modified files or the big files are. Do not forget to set the color's method to sequential or diverging to get a sense of high versus low values.
• Change label to size, specifying clusters use to Sum. This lets you view the aggregated disk usage of each directory of the hierarchy.
• To view both the name and the size, go to Advanced settings and type concat($id, " ", size) in the label parameter.

Files and directories by size

What you see

This view emphasizes the big files, and is therefore very useful to manage disk space by spotting very large files that may have been forgotten a while ago. Here, for instance, you can see that 2 pdf files take roughly one third of the distribution size. Thus, you might want to get rid of them to reduce the size of the distribution for faster downloading.

What you can do

What you could do with the previous view is also useful in this view: navigating, sorting, changing colors and labels, all let you find additional patterns in the directory organization.

Grid view

What you see

This view emphasizes the higher levels of the hierarchy, regardless of the file size or the number of items in the hierarchy. It is useful as an alternate file explorer, as it ensures that you can see all the files at the top level, regardless of their size. You maintain the ability to navigate in the hierarchy, and still get a sense of its structure: which directories have many inner files and directories, and which are flat.

Note that the top-level files discovery.bat, discovery.ico, and so on, which were hidden in the previous views because they were small, are now much more visible and readily available.

What you can do

You can navigate and change parameters as with the first two views. You get less a sense of the relative importance of each file, but, with this view, you are always sure to never miss a file at each level of the hierarchy.

Grid by modification dates

What you see

Instead of grouping files according to their position in the hierarchy, this view groups them by year, month and day in month (other types of hierarchies can be obtained).

This view is useful for assessing temporal file usage, spotting unexpected old or recent files, and getting a sense of when files are modified.

What you can do

You can navigate in the view just like with other treemaps, or add an extra clustering level by hierarchy to view the portions that have been modified the same day as a hierarchy. You can also use a treemap layout to get a sense of the relative size of each year, month, and day within the hierarchy.

Modification date versus size and file type

What you see

This view lets you find a correlation between file size, file type and modification date. You will notice that:

• The largest files are pdf, jar and executable files (in royal blue, cyan-green and yellow).
• The least recently modified files are images (dark blue).
• This view is useful for spotting big, old and potentially unused files that you may want to remove: these usually stay in the bottom right corner of the view.

What you can do

You can use the dynamic filters if your display is cluttered in some areas.

You can change the X and Y axes to other attributes such as file type, file name or path, to view various correlations between the attributes.

Modification date versus size and file type, for each directory in the hierarchy

What you see

This advanced view lets you observe differences in distribution between several sub directories of the hierarchy.

You can also switch to multiple panes view to extract more sophisticated patterns by marking records and seeing the patterns they form in other views.

Viewing your own files with the directory project

You are invited to view your own files with this project. To do so, open the project, choose Data > Open Directory... and open one of the folders you are familiar with. Choose one of the predefined visualizations to start with. Then, from Visualization > Apply Projection > choose one of the preset visualizations that have been set up in this project and view your own files with the predefined views.

Note that exploring the disk drive can be quite long, as all the files have to be parsed. You should perhaps start with a small directory containing no more than a few thousand files to get familiar with the manipulation of views. Viewing your full disk drive may require some patience while Discovery loads the data...

Up to Data Sets.