Fig 1.
Overview of the approach used in BioVis explorer.
Fig 2.
The web-based user interface of our interactive visual guide to BioVis techniques, called BioVis explorer.
Each publication that presents a new BioVis technique is represented by a small rectangular thumbnail showing a cutout of the proposed visualization technique in the main view. The thumbnails are arranged in the 2D plane by using multidimensional scaling, i. e., similar techniques (according to a number of factors) are close to each other. By using the interaction panel on the left hand side, researchers can look for specific BioVis techniques and filter out entries with respect to a set of categories. The survey currently contains 146 categorized BioVis techniques published between 2000 and 2016.
Fig 3.
Detailed information of a publication title.
After clicking on a thumbnail, the user can open a dialog with information on the technique title, corresponding types and properties of data, supported visualization and analysis tasks, corresponding publication, and a BiBTex file with bibliographical information. DOI-based publication URLs, implementation URLs, and PubMed IDs are also displayed if available. By clicking the title of a similar technique, the corresponding technique is displayed directly in the same dialog box.
Fig 4.
Individual comparison of a technique with similar ones.
The selected technique thumbnail in the middle is highlighted with a yellow halo, and the connections to 29 similar techniques are shown. The small box below each thumbnail contains the actual similarity value. For instance, the thumbnail with value 0.72 is the most similar technique compared to the selected item.
Fig 5.
Taxonomy used by BioVis explorer.
Fig 6.
Category statistics for our current data set.
The user can access the statistics for categories presented in Fig 5 by opening the “About” dialog.
Fig 7.
Giving distance factors another weight.
Due to the currently chosen weights (all zero except for publication year and authors), the thumbnails were rearranged by the system.
Fig 8.
The dialog for submitting new visualization technique entries to our survey.
The user can assign the corresponding categories and specify attributes such as technique title, authors and publication year. The optional fields include PubMed ID, publication URL and software implementation URL.