Title

Authors

Affiliation

School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi - 110067, India

Email

foralok@gmail.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Web Server

Date

Received May 21, 2011; Accepted June 06, 2011; Published June 23, 2011

Ontologies have emerged as a fast growing research topic in the area of semantic web during last decade. Currently there are 204 ontologies that are available through OBO Foundry and BioPortal. Several excellent tools for navigating the ontological structure are available, however most of them are dedicated to a specific annotation data or integrated with specific analysis applications, and do not offer flexibility in terms of general-purpose usage for ontology exploration. We developed OntoVisT, a web based ontological visualization tool. This application is designed for interactive visualization of any ontological hierarchy for a specific node of interest, up to the chosen level of children and/or ancestor. It takes any ontology file in OBO format as input and generates output as DAG hierarchical graph for the chosen query. To enhance the navigation capabilities of complex networks, we have embedded several features such as search criteria, zoom in/out, center focus, nearest neighbor highlights and mouse hover events. The application has been tested on all 72 data sets available in OBO format through OBO foundry. The results for few of them can be accessed through OntoVisT-Gallery.

Availability

http://ccbb.jnu.ac.in/OntoVisT.html

Keywords

ontology; visualization tool; directed acyclic graphs; web server; gene ontology.
 

Citation

Srivastava & Sahni. Bioinformation 6(7): 288-290 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.