Visualising Phylogenetic Trees

Wan Zainon, W.N. and Calder, P.

This paper describes techniques for visualising pairs of similar trees. Our aim is to develop ways of presenting the information so as to highlight both the common structure of the trees and their points of difference. The impetus for the work comes from the field of bioinformatics, where geneticists construct complex phylogenetic trees to represent the evolution of species or genes. But the techniques can also be used for other tree-structured data such as file systems, parse trees, decision trees, and organisational hierarchies. To investigate our techniques, we have built a prototype application that reads and displays phylogenetic trees in the popular Nexus format. The application incorporates a variety of interactive and automated visualisation techniques, and is implemented in Java. We are working with biologists to see how well the techniques work for real-world data.

Cite as: Wan Zainon, W.N. and Calder, P. (2006). Visualising Phylogenetic Trees. In Proc. Seventh Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC2006), Hobart, Australia. CRPIT, 50. Piekarski, W., Ed. ACS. 145-152.

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