19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Data Visualization

Immersive Graph-based Visualization and Exploration of Biological Data

N. Férey (ferey@limsi.fr)
P.E. Gros (gros@limsi.fr)
J. Hérisson (herisson@limsi.fr)
R. Gherbi (gherbi@limsi.fr)
LIMSI-CNRS, Université Paris-Sud, France
http://www.limsi.fr

Biologists are now in front of the result of a large work on the genomes (sequencing, alignment, transcriptome). The genomic information resulting from this, show however some characteristics that make them very difficult to interpret and to exploit. They are stored in huge amount of data, are heterogeneous, and are geographically distributed. These data are recorded in structured or semi-structured formats within public or private databanks, and constitute an important factual data source (GenBank, SwissProt, or Decrypthon). But, genome knowledge could not be limited to DNA or protein annotated sequences. Indeed, there is a significant quantity of information relating to these genes, recorded in an unstructured format within millions publications (Medline). This paper presents Genome3DExplorer, a new modelling and software solution to explore textual and factual genomic data based on adapted federator description language. Moreover, Genome3DExplorer offers us a user-friendly visualization of this information within an immersive environment. The visualization is based on a well-adapted graphical paradigm that automatically helps to build a graph-based representation. This solution allows biologist to suitably explore huge sets of genomic data, but it could be applied to other application fields. This kind of graphical exploration has the advantage to highlight some global topological characteristics, which are uneasily visible using traditional exploration tools. Finally, some results produced by Genome3DExplorer software on various sets of biological data, are presented.