Vizbi 2011 abstract

We are submitting an abstract to the Vizbi visualization workshop at the Broad Institute, March 16-19, 2011. The abstract should be a single paragraph of <1200 words, and include one representative image. The abstract should be written "in language accessible to bioinformaticians and biologists who are not specialists in your particular biological domain" and needs to be submitted by Wednesday, March 9.

Abstract text

Visualization of evolutionary trees is a long-studied problem, which has become more critical as the size of published phylogenies increases in parallel with the availability of molecular sequence data. The iPlant Collaborative Tree of Life project has developed a web-based visualization tool for exploration and presentation of phylogenies with hundreds of thousands of leaves. The interface provides an overview of the whole phylogeny plus a detail view where the user can pan and zoom on the tree detail, with clades collapsing and expanding automatically. This level of detail rendering facilitates scalability by managing the amount of data sent to the client, allowing for decreased loading time and giving performance comparable to traditional desktop applications. The interface supports the annotation of nodes, branches and subtrees in order to associate a tree with other types of metadata. The application uses Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the user interface and client/server communication, and is architected in a way that separates the core rendering capabilities and user interface into libraries, allowing integration of this viewer into other websites.

Sample images