[Taxacom] PygmyBrowse

[Roderic Page]

After being so rude about ZooBank, I've decided to try and be a little  
more constructive.

One thing which did annoy me about ZooBank's web site was the way the  
taxonomic tree was displayed (constructive stuff coming, promise). It  
rapidly became huge, and every time the node was clicked on the page  
reloaded, and bounced you back to the top. Trying to navigate through  
chordates, for example, was a nightmare.

I stumbled across the PygmyBrowse tree browser (see  
http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2006/09/pygmybrowse.html for details and  
links to the original work), and thought this might be a useful  
approach to the difficult problem of navigating large trees.

You can view a demo online at  
http://linnaeus.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/pygmy/ . It's at the toy  
stage, but is "live" and is displaying a real classification (in this  
case the ITIS animal classification). It has limitations (after all, it  
was knocked together in a coffee shop while avoiding actual work). The  
search only works for taxa whose name comprises a single word (i.e.,  
you won't find species names), and not all it's features work in  
Microsoft Internet Explorer (which manages to follow most, but not all  
web standards). It works fine in Firefox and Safari.

It doesn't actually do much (you'll see the taxon and ITIS tsn number  
displayed for each taxon you click on), but what I'm interested in is  
any comments on whether this is a useful approach to navigating trees,  
which is a common task in our area.

For the technically minded, it's written in PHP, uses AJAX, and ITIS is  
stored in a MySQL database. If that means anything to you you'll  
realise how easy it is to do this. If, however, it reads like  
gibberish, then you'll realise that I'm just trying to show off by  
drowning you in acronyms.

Regards

Rod

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
web:      http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
iChat:    aim://rodpage1962
reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html

Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic
Biologists Website:  http://systematicbiology.org
Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/
Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org
Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com