Linked Hyperbolic Trees

During the working group meeting Feb. 8, the discussion of approaches that would scale visualization for Tree Reconciliation were introduced. This related to concepts previous communicate by Todd Vision to Sheldon McKay. Below is the summary pulled from email communication:

Rebecca Shapley has an example of a hyperbolic tree view for Green Plants:

• http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/TreeofLife/hyperbolic.php

The example makes use of semantic zooming (a suggested visual approach by Sheldon McKay). Imagine decorations on the internal nodes that would only be exposed at appropriate magnification (e.g. names, ages, duplication/speciation labels).

The twist Todd would like to introduce, since researchers focusing on Tree Reconciliation are interested in the relationships between trees, is to link multiple trees interactively. Specifically, Todd would like to see a branch selected by a user on one tree bring the "corresponding" lineage into view within the other tree. Because of the potentially one-to-many relationship between a species tree branch and gene tree branches, this might only be possible by selecting a gene tree branch and bringing the corresponding region within in a species tree into view, rather than the other possible combination of what to select and view. But it would still very useful for simultaneously keeping track of where you are in a large species tree and a large gene tree, while keeping track of the relationship between the two.