BioVis Explorer: A visual guide for biological data visualization techniques

<div><p>Data visualization is of increasing importance in the Biosciences. During the past 15 years, a great number of novel methods and tools for the visualization of biological data have been developed and published in various journals and conference proceedings. As a consequence, keeping an overview of state-of-the-art visualization research has become increasingly challenging for both biology researchers and visualization researchers. To address this challenge, we have reviewed visualization research especially performed for the Biosciences and created an interactive web-based visualization tool, the BioVis Explorer. BioVis Explorer allows the exploration of published visualization methods in interactive and intuitive ways, including faceted browsing and associations with related methods. The tool is publicly available online and has been designed as community-based system which allows users to add their works easily.</p></div

Detailed information of a publication title.

<p>After clicking on a thumbnail, the user can open a dialog with information on the technique title, corresponding types and properties of data, supported visualization and analysis tasks, corresponding publication, and a BiBTex file with bibliographical information. DOI-based publication URLs, implementation URLs, and PubMed IDs are also displayed if available. By clicking the title of a similar technique, the corresponding technique is displayed directly in the same dialog box.</p

Taxonomy used by BioVis explorer.

<p>Taxonomy used by BioVis explorer.</p

Individual comparison of a technique with similar ones.

<p>The selected technique thumbnail in the middle is highlighted with a yellow halo, and the connections to 29 similar techniques are shown. The small box below each thumbnail contains the actual similarity value. For instance, the thumbnail with value 0.72 is the most similar technique compared to the selected item.</p

Category statistics for our current data set.

<p>The user can access the statistics for categories presented in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0187341#pone.0187341.g005" target="_blank">Fig 5</a> by opening the “About” dialog.</p

The web-based user interface of our interactive visual guide to BioVis techniques, called BioVis explorer.

<p>Each publication that presents a new BioVis technique is represented by a small rectangular thumbnail showing a cutout of the proposed visualization technique in the main view. The thumbnails are arranged in the 2D plane by using multidimensional scaling, i. e., similar techniques (according to a number of factors) are close to each other. By using the interaction panel on the left hand side, researchers can look for specific BioVis techniques and filter out entries with respect to a set of categories. The survey currently contains 146 categorized BioVis techniques published between 2000 and 2016.</p