OLSVis: an animated, interactive visual browser for bio-ontologies

摘要

Background: More than one million terms from biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies are availablethrough the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). Although OLS provides ample possibility for querying and browsingterms, the visualization of parts of the ontology graphs is rather limited and inflexible.Results: We created the OLSVis web application, a visualiser for browsing all ontologies available in the OLSdatabase. OLSVis shows customisable subgraphs of the OLS ontologies. Subgraphs are animated via a real-timeforce-based layout algorithm which is fully interactive: each time the user makes a change, e.g. browsing to a newterm, hiding, adding, or dragging terms, the algorithm performs smooth and only essential reorganisations of thegraph. This assures an optimal viewing experience, because subsequent screen layouts are not grossly altered, andusers can easily navigate through the graph. URL: http://ols.wordvis.comConclusions: The OLSVis web application provides a user-friendly tool to visualise ontologies from the OLSrepository. It broadens the possibilities to investigate and select ontology subgraphs through a smooth visualisationmethod.Keywords: Bio-ontologies, Visualisation, Browsing, Web application