Visualizations for taxonomic and phylogenetic trees

  • Authors:

  • Cynthia Sims Parr;Bongshin Lee;Dana Campbell;Benjamin B. Bederson

  • Affiliations:

  • Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;Human Computer Interaction Lab, Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;Human Computer Interaction Lab, Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

  • Venue:
  • Bioinformatics
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Motivation: Despite substantial efforts to develop and populate the back-ends of biological databases, front-ends to these systems often rely on taxonomic expertise. This research applies techniques from human--computer interaction research to the biodiversity domain. Results: We developed an interactive node-link tool, TaxonTree, illustrating the value of a carefully designed interaction model, animation, and integrated searching and browsing towards retrieval of biological names and other information. Users tested the tool using a new, large integrated dataset of animal names with phylogenetic-based and classification-based tree structures. These techniques also translated well for a tool, DoubleTree, to allow comparison of trees using coupled interaction. Our approaches will be useful not only for biological data but as general portal interfaces. Availability: Working versions of TaxonTree and DoubleTree and video demonstrations of DoubleTree are available at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/biodiversity Supplementary information: All datasets and folk tree illustration are available at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/biodiversity