Zomit: biological data visualization and browsing

Motivation: The problems caused by the difficulty in visualizing and browsi ng biological databases have become crucial. Scientists can no longer inter act directly with the huge amount of available data. However , future break throughs in biology depend on this interaction. We propose a new metaphor f or biological data visualization and browsing that allows navigation in ver y large databases in an intuitive way. The concepts underlying our approach are based on navigation and visualization with zooming, semantic zooming a nd portals; and on data transformation via magic lenses. We think that thes e new visualization and navigation techniques should be applied globally to a federation of biological databases. Results: We have implemented a generic tool, called Zomit, that provides an application programming interface for developing servers for such navigati on and visualization, and a generic architecture-independent client (Java(T M) applet) that queries such servers. As an illustration of the capabilitie s of our approach, we have developed ZoomMap, a prototype browser for the H uGeMap human genome map database.