Interactive Visualizations for
Biodiversity Information
Bongshin Lee
Researcher
Visualization and Interaction Research Group
Microsoft Research
Interactive Visualizations for
Biodiversity Information
Bongshin Lee
Computer Science Department
Human-Computer Interaction Lab
University of Maryland
Why Interactive Visualization?
Biodiversity databases have become widely
available to the public and to other researchers
Trees and graphs are commonly used
information structures
Animal classification, food webs, gene ontology, …
Visual representations exploit human visual
processing to reduce the cognitive load
Better interactive tools are needed for visual
data exploration
TaxonTree
NSF-funded project at UMD with
- Cyndy Parr
- Dana Campbell
- Ben Bederson
PaperLens
Biodiversity is the extraordinary
variety of all life on Earth - from genes to
species to entire ecosystems.
-- Smithsonian Institution Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program
Challenge
Complex databases
Organism names
Habitats
Interactions
Conservation status
Reproductive
parameters
…
Non-expert users
Policy makers
Land-use planners
Educators
Students
Laypersons
…
TaxonTree
- Visualizing the Taxonomic Hierarchy
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/biodiversity
Hierarchy of 200,000 animal names
Integration of public/private sources
Extension of SpaceTree
[Plaisant et al., InfoVis ’02]
Interactive tree visualization
Integrated searching and browsing
Animation
B. Lee, C.S. Parr, D. Campbell, B.B. Bederson (2004)
How Users Interact with Biodiversity Information Using TaxonTree
Proceedings of AVI 2004, pp. 320-327
C.S. Parr, B. Lee, D. Campbell, B.B. Bederson (2004)
Visualizations for Taxonomic and Phylogenetic Trees
Bioinformatics, Vol. 20, No. 17, pp. 2997-3004
TaxonTree Design
Collaborative design
Target audience
Undergraduates in biology class
Transitioning from novice to expert
Undergraduate design partners
Domain-specific visualization
Scaling up
TaxonTree
Demo
Written in Java
with Piccolo.Java
TaxonTree Evaluation
Qualitative study with 18 biology students
Goals
Characterize users of biodiversity domain
Investigate usability and interaction preferences
Examine information understanding
Results
Interaction with the tree is very intuitive
Browse rather than search
Make inferences using tree structure
Interested users want more control over interaction
Adopting TaxonTree
Deployed for the public
University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web (ADW),
http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu
60,000 visits/day
Biologists love TaxonTree
Phylogeny of Lepidoptera Project (LepTree),
http://www.leptree.net
California Academy of Sciences’ AntWeb,
http://www.antweb.org
Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research
(CIPRES), http://www.phylo.org
Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge
(SEEK), http://seek.ecoinformatics.org
Discussion
Interactive tree visualization can be
applied to the biodiversity domain for a
broad audience
Integrated searching and browsing
with animation
Incremental Exploration
Beyond Hierarchies?
TaxonTree
Intern project at MSR with
- Mary Czerwinski, MSR
- George Robertson, MSR
- Ben Bederson, UMD
PaperLens
Motivation
InfoVis 2004 Contest
The history of InfoVis
155 papers by 315 authors for 8 years (1995~2002)
Tasks
Characterize the research areas and their evolution
Where does a particular author fit within the research
areas?
What are the relationships between two or more or all
authors?
http:// www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/iv04contest
PaperLens
- Non Node-link Graph Visualization
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/paperlens
Multiple small and simple components
Abstract overview of data
Show relationships dynamically
Winner of InfoVis 2004 Contest
Two design iterations: InfoVis and CHI
B. Lee, M. Czerwinski, G. Robertson, B.B. Bederson (2005)
Understanding Research Trends in Conferences using PaperLens
Extended Abstracts of CHI 2005, pp. 1069-1072
B. Lee, M. Czerwinski, G. Robertson, B.B. Bederson (2004)
Understanding Eight Years of InfoVis Conferences using PaperLens
Posters Compendium of InfoVis 2004, pp. 53-54
Intern Project at Microsoft Research
PaperLens - CHI
• 23 years (1982-2004)
• 4073 papers
• 6300 authors
• 15 topics
Written in C#
with Piccolo.NET
Demo
PaperLens Evaluation
Qualitative study with the InfoVis dataset
8 researchers (including 1 pilot subject)
16 tasks
Results
Most tasks were performed in less than 20 seconds
Usability Issues
Author search
Consistency
Screen usage
EcoLens
-- Visualizing food webs
Project at UMD with
- Cyndy Parr
- Ben Bederson
Discussion
NetLens: Extension of PaperLens
General: “Content-Actor” data model
Scalable: Relational database, simple components
Implemented by Hyunmo Kang (HCIL, UMD)
H. Kang, C. Plaisant, B. Lee, B.B. Bederson (2006)
NetLens: Iterative Exploration of Content-Actor Network Data
To appear in Proceedings of VAST 2006, invited to Information Visualization Journal
H. Kang, C. Plaisant, B. Lee, B.B. Bederson (2006)
Exploring Content-Actor Paired Network Data using Iterative Query Refinement
with NetLens
Proceedings of JCDL 2006, pp. 372 (Demo)
Node-link graph visualization has its place
Integrate it with EcoLens/NetLens
Conclusions
For more information
• http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/biodiversity
• http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/graphvis
Interactive visualization helps data
exploration and understanding
TaxonTree
poses little difficulty even for novice users
can be applied to other taxonomies
PaperLens
novel alternative to common node-link graph
visualizations
its concept can be applied to biodiversity
domain
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