Visualisation of Ontologies and Large Scale Graphs

February 17, 2010 7 Comments

{{en|A phylogenetic tree of life, showing the ...
Image via Wikipedia

For a whole number of reasons, I am currently looking into the visualisation of large-scale graphs and ontologies and to that end, I have made some notes concerning tools and concepts which might be useful for others. Here they are:

Visualisation by Node-Link and Tree

jOWL: jQuery Plugin for the navigation and visualisation of OWL ontologies and RDFS documents. Visualisations mainly as trees, navigation bars.

OntoViz: Plugin into Protege…at the moment supports Protege 3.4 and doesn’t seem to work with Protege 4.

IsaViz: Much the same as OntoViz really. Last stable version 2004 and does not seem to see active development.

NeOn Toolkit: The Neon toolkit also has some visualisation capability, but not independent of the editor. Under active development with a growing user base.

OntoTrack: OntoTrack is a graphical OWL editor and as such has visualisation capabilities. Meager though and it does not seem to be supported or developed anymore either…the current version seems about 5 years old.

Cone Trees: Cone trees are three-dimensional extensions of 2D tree structures and have been designed to allow for a greater amount odf information to be visualised and navigated. Not found any software for download at the moment, but the idea is so interesting that we should bear it in mind. Examples are here, here and the key reference is Robertson, George G. and Mackinlay, Jock D. and Card, Stuart K., Cone Trees: animated 3D visualizations of hierarchical information, CHI ’91: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 1991, ISBN = 0-89791-383-3, pp.189-194. (DOI here)

PhyloWidget: PhyloWidget is software for the visualisation of phylogenetic trees, but should be repurposable for ontology trees. Javascript – so appropriate for websites. Student project as part of the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code 2007.

The JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit: Extremely pretty JS toolkit for the visualisation of graphs etc…..Dynamic and interactive visualisations too…just pretty. Have spent some time hacking with it and I am becoming a fan.

Welkin: Standalone application for the visualisation of RDF graphs. Allows dynamic filtering, colour coding of resources etc…

Three-Dimensional Visualisation

Ontosphere3D: Visualisation of ontologies on 3D spheres. Does not seem to be supported anymore and requires Java 3D, which is just a bad nightmare in itself.

Cone Trees (see above) with their extension of Disc Trees (for an example of disc trees, see here

3D Hyperbolic Tree as exemplified by the Walrus software. Originally developed for website visualisation, results in stunnign images. Not under active development anymore, but source code available for download.

Cytoscape: The 1000 pound gorilla in the room of large-scale graph visualization. There are several plugins available for interaction with the Gene Ontology, such as BiNGO and ClueGO. Both tools consider the ontologies as annotation rather than a knowledgebase of its own and can be used for the identification of GO terms, which are overrepresented in a cluster/network. In terms of visualisation of ontologies themselves, there is there is the RDFScape plugin, which can visualize ontologies.

Zoomable Visualisations

Jamabalaya – Protege Plugin, but can also run as a browser applet. Uses Shrimp to visualise class hierarchies in ontologies and arrows between boxes to represent relationships.

CropCircles (link is to the paper describing it): CropCircles have been implemented in the SWOOP ontology editor which is not under active development anymore, but where the source code is available.

Information Landscapes – again, no software, just papers.

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SWAT4LS2009 – Linking Open Drug Data to Cheminformatics abd Proteochemometrics

November 20, 2009 1 Comment

Structure of ascorbic acid also called vitamin C
Image via Wikipedia

(Notes frm the presentation as it happens)

Knowledge is not uni or bivariate, but we think of it as such: this leads to information loss.

Naming things: showing example of a trivial name, an IUPAC systematic name and an InChI and points out that these have different information content.

Points out scaling problem: drug discovery is multivariate and happens in a space of approx 1016 molecules (all molecules that are feasible and thought to be drug-like). Information loss occurs as you traverse this space backwards and forwards.

Now talks about molecular information in RDF: http://rdf.openmolecules.net for the provision of derefernceable URIs for molecules….and plugging the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) as a means for cnverting between multiple representations of a molecule. Now moves on to Bioclipse as an integrating tool that allows chemical data transformations and the tracking of vwhy these transformations occur (version-controllable scripts to drive Bioclipse).

RDF extension to bioclipse: local RDF storage, read/write RDF, run SPARQL queries and extract RDF from XHTTML/RDFa.

Now shows an example of the expression of the CDK data model using ontologies but no details. Brief mention of his recent descriptor ontology.

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SWAT4LS2009 – Keynote Alan Ruttenberg: Semantic Web Technology to Support Studying the Relation of HLA Structure Variation to Disease

November 20, 2009 2 Comments

(These are live-blogging notes from Alan’s keynote…so don’t expect any coherent text….use them as bullt points to follow the gist of the argument.)

The Science Commons:

  • a project of the Creative Commons
  • 6 people
  • CC specializes CC to science
  • information discovery and re-use
  • establish legal clarity around data sharing and encourage automated attribution and provenance

Semantic Web for Biologist because it maximizes value o scientific work by removing repeat experimentation.

ImmPort Semantic Integration Feasibility Project

  • Immport is an immunology database and analysis portal
  • Goals:metaanalysis
  • Question: how can ontology help data integration for data from many sources

Using semantics to help integrate sequence features of HLA with disorders
Challenges:

  • Curation of sequence features
  • Linking to disorders
  • Associating allele sequences with peptide structures with nomenclature with secondary structure with human phenotype etc etc etc…

Talks about elements of representation

  • pdb structures translated into ontology-bases respresentations
  • canonical MHC molecule instances constructed from IMGT
  • relate each residue in pdb to the canonical residue if exists
  • use existing ontologies
  • contact points between peptide and other chains computed using JMOL following IMGT. Represented as relation between residue instances.
  • Structural features have fiat parts

Connecting Allele Names to Disease Names

  • use papers as join factors: papers mention both disease and allele – noisy
  • use regex and rewrites applied to titles and abstracts to fish out links between diseases and alleles

Correspondence of molecules with allele structures is difficult.

  • use blast to fiind closest allele match between pdb and allele sequence
  • every pdb and allele residue has URI
  • relate matching molecules
  • relate each allele residue to the canonical allele
  • annotate various residoes with various coordinate systems

This creates massive map that can be navigated and queried. Example queries:

  • What autoimmune diseases can de indexed against a given allele?
  • What are the variant residues at a position?
  • Classification of amino acids
  • Show alleles perturned at contacts of 1AGB

Summary of Progress to Date:
Elements of Approach in Place: Structure, Variation, transfer of annotation via alignment, information extraction from literature etc…

Nuts and Bolts:

  • Primary source
  • Local copy of souce
  • Scripts transforms to RDF
  • Exports RDF Bundles
  • Get selected RDF Bundles and load into triple store
  • Parsers generate in memory structures (python, java)
  • Template files are instructions to fomat these into owl
  • Modeling is iteratively refined by editiing templates
  • RDF loaded into Neurocommons, some amount of reasoning

RDFHerd package management for data

neurocommons.org/bundles

Can we reduce the burden of data integration?

  • Too many people are doing data integration – wasting effort
  • Use web as platform
  • Too many ontologies…here’s the social pressure again

Challenges

  • have lawyers bless every bit of data integration
  • reasoning over triple stores
  • SPARQL over HTTP
  • Understand and exploit ontology and reasoning
  • Grow a software ecosystem like Firefox
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What’s Eating Scientific Data? – Google Tech Talk on the Chemical Semantic Web

July 9, 2009 Leave a comment

google

Jim and I recently visited Google, where we were invited to give a tech talk about our research and the work that the PMR group in Cambridge is doing. It’s now online and you can watch it on YouTube here:

We are discussing the semantic toolstack as applied to chemistry and show how CML, RDF and ontologies can be used to bring chemical data into the 21st century. Jim also talks extensively about Lensfield – our system for the generation, management and publication of semantically rich linkeed data. A big thank you also to David Konerding for hosting us during the day and for the great discussions!

(If the video doesn’t show up in your feedreader, please click through to the the webpage.)

Looking forward to your comments!

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