FlatNJ: A novel network-based approach to visualize evolutionary and biogeographical relationships

Split networks are a type of phylogenetic network that allow visualization of conflict in evolutionary data. We present a new method for constructing such networks called FlatNetJoining (FlatNJ). A key feature of FlatNJ is that it produces networks that can be drawn in the plane in which labels may appear inside of the network. For complex data sets that involve, for example, non-neutral molecular markers, this can allow additional detail to be visualized as compared to previous methods such as split decomposition and NeighborNet. We illustrate the application of FlatNJ by applying it to whole HIV genome sequences, where recombination has taken place, fluorescent proteins in corals, where ancestral sequences are present, and mitochondrial DNA sequences from gall wasps, where biogeographical relationships are of interest. We find that the networks generated by FlatNJ can facilitate the study of genetic variation in the underlying molecular sequence data and, in particular, may help to investigate processes such as intra-locus recombination. FlatNJ has been implemented in Java and is freely available at www.uea.ac.uk/computing/software/flatnj

An environment for educational service communities

In most global economies, there is a strong trend from agriculture and manufacturing towards service-orientation and tertiarisation: Services, products with value-added service solutions and, more recently, automated Internet service offerings seamlessly delivered through on-demand elastic cloud computing resources. In the affected societies, education is recognised as a key factor for maintaining the competitiveness. Specialised education about services is widely available, but tool support for hands-on learning and testing of how services can be produced, offered, delivered and improved is missing. We aim to fill this gap between theory and application by proposing an integrated environment for educational service communities such as service engineering classes. Initial results of our work show that the environment, which supports both auto-didactic learning and team-based competitive and collaborative learning-by-doing throughout the service lifecycle, motivates students and increases their practical knowledge about services. Our experience with the actual use of the environment in the context of a university course about web services and conclude the article with suggestions for future work are discussed