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Logo of bmcbioiBioMed Centralsearchsubmit a manuscriptregisterthis articleBMC Bioinformatics
 
BMC Bioinformatics. 2012; 13: 116.
Published online 2012 July 10. doi:  10.1186/1471-2105-13-116
PMCID: PMC3394205
Copyright ©2012 Vercruysse et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
OLSVis: an animated, interactive visual browser for bio-ontologies
Reviewed by Steven Vercruysse,corresponding author1 Aravind Venkatesan,1 and Martin Kuiper1
1Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
corresponding authorCorresponding author.
Steven Vercruysse: vercruys/at/nt.ntnu.no; Aravind Venkatesan: venkates/at/nt.ntnu.no; Martin Kuiper: kuiper/at/nt.ntnu.no
Received December 9, 2011; Accepted May 30, 2012.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Abstract
Background
More than one million terms from biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies are available through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). Although OLS provides ample possibility for querying and browsing terms, 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 OLS database. OLSVis shows customisable subgraphs of the OLS ontologies. Subgraphs are animated via a real-time force-based layout algorithm which is fully interactive: each time the user makes a change, e.g. browsing to a new term, hiding, adding, or dragging terms, the algorithm performs smooth and only essential reorganisations of the graph. This assures an optimal viewing experience, because subsequent screen layouts are not grossly altered, and users can easily navigate through the graph. URL: http://ols.wordvis.com
Conclusions
The OLSVis web application provides a user-friendly tool to visualise ontologies from the OLS repository. It broadens the possibilities to investigate and select ontology subgraphs through a smooth visualisation method.
Keywords: Bio-ontologies, Visualisation, Browsing, Web application
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