Mohamad-Matrol Afrina Adlyna, Chang Siow-Wee, Abu Arpah
Institute of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Centre of Research for Computational Sciences and Informatics for Biology, Bioindustry, Environment, Agriculture and Healthcare, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
PeerJ. 2018 Aug 31;6:e5579. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5579. eCollection 2018.
The amount of plant data such as taxonomical classification, morphological characteristics, ecological attributes and geological distribution in textual and image forms has increased rapidly due to emerging research and technologies. Therefore, it is crucial for experts as well as the public to discern meaningful relationships from this vast amount of data using appropriate methods. The data are often presented in lengthy texts and tables, which make gaining new insights difficult. The study proposes a visual-based representation to display data to users in a meaningful way. This method emphasises the relationships between different data sets.
This study involves four main steps which translate text-based results from Extensible Markup Language (XML) serialisation format into graphs. The four steps include: (1) conversion of ontological dataset as graph model data; (2) query from graph model data; (3) transformation of text-based results in XML serialisation format into a graphical form; and (4) display of results to the user via a graphical user interface (GUI). Ontological data for plants and samples of trees and shrubs were used as the dataset to demonstrate how plant-based data could be integrated into the proposed data visualisation.
A visualisation system named plant visualisation system was developed. This system provides a GUI that enables users to perform the query process, as well as a graphical viewer to display the results of the query in the form of a network graph. The efficiency of the developed visualisation system was measured by performing two types of user evaluations: a usability heuristics evaluation, and a query and visualisation evaluation.
The relationships between the data were visualised, enabling the users to easily infer the knowledge and correlations between data. The results from the user evaluation show that the proposed visualisation system is suitable for both expert and novice users, with or without computer skills. This technique demonstrates the practicability of using a computer assisted-tool by providing cognitive analysis for understanding relationships between data. Therefore, the results benefit not only botanists, but also novice users, especially those that are interested to know more about plants.
由于新兴研究和技术的出现，以文本和图像形式存在的植物数据（如分类学分类、形态特征、生态属性和地理分布）数量迅速增加。因此，对于专家和公众而言，使用适当方法从海量数据中辨别有意义的关系至关重要。这些数据通常以冗长的文本和表格形式呈现，这使得获取新见解变得困难。该研究提出了一种基于视觉的表示方法，以有意义的方式向用户展示数据。此方法强调不同数据集之间的关系。
本研究涉及四个主要步骤，即将基于文本的可扩展标记语言（XML）序列化格式的结果转换为图形。这四个步骤包括：（1）将本体数据集转换为图形模型数据；（2）从图形模型数据进行查询；（3）将基于文本的XML序列化格式的结果转换为图形形式；（4）通过图形用户界面（GUI）向用户显示结果。使用植物的本体数据以及树木和灌木样本作为数据集，以展示如何将基于植物的数据集成到所提出的数据可视化中。
开发了一个名为植物可视化系统的可视化系统。该系统提供了一个GUI，使用户能够执行查询过程，以及一个图形查看器，以网络图的形式显示查询结果。通过进行两种类型的用户评估来衡量所开发可视化系统的效率：可用性启发式评估以及查询和可视化评估。
数据之间的关系得到了可视化，使用户能够轻松推断数据之间的知识和相关性。用户评估结果表明，所提出的可视化系统适用于有或没有计算机技能的专家和新手用户。该技术通过提供用于理解数据之间关系的认知分析，证明了使用计算机辅助工具的实用性。因此，结果不仅有益于植物学家，也有益于新手用户，特别是那些有兴趣更多了解植物的用户。
