Immersive graph-based visualization and exploration of biological data relationships

Abstract

Genomic information shows some characteristics that make them very difficult to interpret and to exploit. Such data constitute an important factual resource (GenBank, SwissProt, GeneOntology, or Decrypthon...), are heterogeneous, huge in quantity, and geographically distributed. This paper presents Genome3DExplorer, a new modeling and software solution to visualize textual and factual genomic data based on adapted federator description language. The exploration is based on a well-adapted graphical paradigm that automatically helps to build a graph-based representation, and allows biologist to highlight some global topological characteristics of data, which are uneasily visible using traditional exploration tools. Finally, we present results produced by Genome3DExplorer software on various sets of biological data.