This paper by Martin Graham, Jessie Kennedy and myself (mostly Martin and Jessie) describes some of the taxonomic visualisation work undertaken at Edinburgh Napier University. This includes the Concept Relationship Editor and the impressive TaxVis application designed and developed by Martin Graham. Jessie and Martin’s current project VIPER also looks very interesting, its a tool to remove errors in animal pedigree information caused by administrative and data handling faults.
The Concept Relationship Editor is an interactive visualisation tool designed to support the specification of relationships between hierarchical taxonomic classifications. The tool operates using an interactive space-filling adjacency layout which allows users to expand multiple lists of taxa with common parents so they can explore and add relationships between two classifications. Whenever selected lists contain too many items for them to be legible within the restrictions of available screen space the user can alleviate the problem by either operating in ‘lens mode’ or ‘scroll mode’. In ‘lens mode’ the layout is configured so that both of the classifications and all the relationships are completely visible on-screen. Here a fish-eye lens type distortion effect is applied under the cursor to allow taxa names with less assigned space to be made legible. In ‘scroll mode’ the layout assigns sufficient space for the labels of all expanded taxa lists to be legible and scroll bars can be used to navigate across the hierarchy of either classification. While the ‘lens mode’ provides context and allows for more direct comparison of relationships throughout the classifications, ‘scroll mode’ tends to allow for relationships to be added more efficiently between smaller groups of similarly classified taxa.
Navigation
Fisheye views
Creating a relationship
Publications
Craig, P., Kennedy, J. (2008). Concept Relationship Editor: A visual interface to support the assertion of synonymy relationships between taxonomic classifications. In: Börner, K., Gröhn, M., Park, J., Roberts, J. (Eds.) Visualization and Data Analysis 2008, Proceedings of the SPIE, 6809. (pp. 680906-680912). San Jose, CA: Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, Bellingham, WA, ETATS-UNIS . Craig Kenedy_Concept Relationship Editor
Graham, M., Craig, P., Kennedy, J. (2008). Visualisation to Aid Biodiversity Studies through Accurate Taxonomic Reconciliation. In: Gray, A., Jeffery, K., Shao, J. (Eds.) Proceedings of British National Conference on Database Systems: Sharing Data, Information and Knowledge, 5071/2008 (LNCS 5071 ed.). (pp. 280-291). Cardiff, UK: Springer-Verlag. GrahamCKBioVis
Craig, P., Kennedy, J. (2007). Concept Relationship Editor: A visual interface to support the creation of relationships between taxonomic classifications (poster). Paper presented at InfoVis2007, Sacramento CA. Craig_Kennedy Poster Summary
