A Cheops representation
Cheops was the brainchild of my friend and colleague Luc Beaudoin [http://pages.infinit.net/lbeaudoi/], with some input from me and Louis Vroomen. It is a unique technique for exploring very large hierarchies on limited screen space, through visual component re-use and unique, stable visual signatures for paths through the hierarchy.
Cheops was first implemented in the context of the Francoroute [http://web.archive.org/web/19970220094736/www.francoroute.org/aide/apropos.html] project, and then was presented in this article [/~maparent/paper.html] at the IEEE Visualization '96 [http://WWW.ERC.MsState.Edu/conferences/vis96/] conference. Later, Luc's ideas on hierarchies continued to evolve into a theory of visual elision, which was presented [/~maparent/GizaMaryland.pptx] at a workshop [http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1998.2/vroomen.html] on visualizing hierarchies, organised with Ben Schneidermann [http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/], at HCIL [http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/index.html] labs, and at another presentation [/~maparent/Giza_CIUL.html] at the CIUL [https://web.archive.org/web/20000615045503/http://www.ciul.org/] (which we later repeated at CapCHI [http://www.capchi.org/].)
We went much further than the original idea; a glance here might suggest what we were up to...
A millipede with some cross-links
Cheops and its following incarnations were a unique opportunity for me to work on complex information visualization, as well as to develop my ideas on softare engineering (see Giza.)
Cheops did not survive our leaving CRIM; the relevant pages since disappeared from their site. I believe I could still show my cache of an old page: CheopsLite [/~maparent/CheopsLite].
As for the rest... Luc has many more ideas in reserve.