Using the Visual Taxonomy Browser

Video Transcript

My name is Logan. I’m a developer that works on the ICTV project. Today I’ll be talking about our visual taxonomy browser.

The visual taxonomy browser was developed to give users another option to view taxonomic data. For example, the way that the visual browser displays taxa is better equipped for presentations or inserting into publications. All browsers here on the ICTV website pull from the same database. This means when we update the data, it is updated for all the taxonomy browsers on the site.

I’ll now navigate home and show you guys how to get to the visual taxonomy browser. So I’m just going to click home. I’m going to go to the taxonomy dropdown right here, and then I’m going to click visual taxonomy browser.

Okay, here at the top of the page there is a click for help dropdown that gets general information about how to use this web application. Some of what’s provided in this click for help I’ll be going over now. Starting with the release. By default, the newest ICTV release will be selected, which is MSL40. If you would like to change that, all you have to do is click the dropdown and select a different release just like so.

Next to the release dropdown there’s a font size slider that lets you change the font of all the taxa. And then there’s also a zoom slider that lets you zoom in and out on the display. In addition to the zoom slider, you can also just do this with your mouse or trackpad using a scroll wheel to zoom in and out like so.

To the right of the sliders we have export options. We have three different export options, which are PNG, SVG, and PDF. All you need to do to select an export is click on it and then click the blue export button right here, and the export will automatically save to your downloads folder.

In order to browse the visual taxonomy, all you need to do is select whichever taxon you want to branch out to, and it’ll go to whichever corresponding rank that it belongs to. So I’m all the way out under class at the moment. So if I wanted to collapse this, I could do it the same way that I did when expanding it. So say I want to collapse all the way to film, all I need to do is simply click the taxon that’s underneath the film. Same with if you wanted to collapse all the way to the realm or root node right here. All I need to do is click it, and it’ll collapse.

These taxa also have a popup that displays whenever you’re hovering over it. It gives its rank, it gives its name, and then it gives some information about the children that are underneath it. In addition to that, there is a link that brings you to the taxon details page, which is this view taxon history. So that’s all you need to do to get to the taxon details page.

You can also use the search option up here if you have a good idea about which taxon that you’re looking for. By default it’ll search whichever release that you have selected. But if you wanted to search past ICTV releases, all you would need to do is select the box right here below the search bar.

And I’ll do a search right now. So I’m going to just search a partial text which is pox, and I’ll have some results pop up right here. I’ll have a view button right here that will automatically expand to the search result that I want to choose. There’s a history button that brings you to the taxon details page. It also gives other information about which release it’s from, which rank it is, and then the lineage.

So say I want to select potty virus plumoxy. All I need to do is click the view button and it’ll automatically expand to potty virus plumoxy, and once it’s expanded, it will highlight the search result that you clicked on.

In this instance we have a bunch of species that are in this particular rank. So in order to save space on the screen we ended up having to paginate it. So you’ll find at the bottom and at the top there’s a more button that you can click through to paginate through the different taxa.

And that pretty much wraps up what I needed to talk about with the visual taxonomy browser.