How to cite: Page, R. (2021). Maximum entropy summary trees to display higher classifications https://doi.org/10.59350/af01t-6sw74 A challenge in working with large taxonomic classifications is how you display them to the user, especially if the user probably doesn't want all the gory details.
It's funny how some images stick in the mind. A few years ago Chris Freeland (@chrisfreeland), then working for Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created a visualisation of BHL content relevant to the African continent. It's a nice example of small multiples. For more than a decade (gulp) I've been extracting articles from the BHL and storing them in BioStor.
Continuing my on-again off-again relationship with the Semantic Web, I stumbled across a cool approach to visualising the results of SPARQL queries.
Inspired in part by the release of the draft tree of life (doi:10.1073/pnas.1423041112 by the Open Tree of Life, I've been revisiting (yet again) ways to visualise very big phylogenies (see Very large phylogeny viewer for my last attempt). My latest experiment uses Google Maps to render a large tree. Google Maps uses "tiles" to create a zoomable interface, so we need to create tiles for different zoom levels for the phylogeny.
I'm adding more charts to the GBIF Chart tool, including some to explore the type status of specimens from the Solomon Islands. There are nearly 500 holotypes from this region, so quite a few new species have been discovered in this region.
Following on from the previous post on visualising GBIF data, I've added some more interactivity.
Tim Roberston and the ream at GBIF are working on some nice visualisations of GBIF data, and have made an early release available for viewing: http://analytics.gbif-uat.org.
As announced on phylobabble I've started to revisit visualising large phylogenies, building on some work I did a couple of years ago (my how time flies). This time, there is actual code (see https://github.com/rdmpage/deep-tree) as well as a live demo http://iphylo.org/~rpage/deep-tree/demo/. You can see the amphibian tree below at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/deep-tree/demo/show.php?id=5369171e32b7a: You can upload or paste a tree (for now in
James Rosindell's OneZoom tree viewer is out and the paper describing the viewer has been published in PLoS One (disclosure, I was a reviewer): Below is a video where James describes OneZoom. Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. OneZoom is fun, and is deservedly attracting a a lot of attention.
Prompted by a conversation with Vince Smith at the recent Online Taxonomy meeting at the Linnean Society in London I've been revisiting touch-based displays of large trees. There are a couple of really impressive examples of what can be done. Perceptive Pixel I've blogged about this before, but came across another video that better captures the excitement of touch-based navigation of a taxonomy.