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Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

ptree.org

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Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#11

Post by Lucent »

kpil wrote: post #10
kmoser wrote: post #9

Tufte would love this interface; it packs a ton of info, but is easy to use and understand.

The tree map folding is ingenious. I have never seen it. As a whole it's brilliant and humbling. Both the vastness and complexity of nature and biology on Earth, and also the absurd amount of work and human lifetime that has been spent on gathering the information. It's also a testament of the power of Wikipedia.

The gutter fold is entirely custom and took a month to get right. Try a link like this to see how the lines fold around each other in the gutter so hierarchy is preserved. https://ptree.org/#GBIF/Nutrition/42&view=tree&tab=wiki&open...

The project only exists thanks to thousands of scientists carefully cataloguing all this data and releasing it CC-BY. I am only the interface.

Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#12

Post by culi »

Very cool. Perhaps you've seen OneZoom[0] already which is purely based on phylogenetic data sourced from Open Tree of Life. OTOL has been around for a long time. The project aggregates phylogenetic data from thousands of studies and creates a massive synthetic tree.[1] It's neat because anyone can contribute. If you find a study not represented in there you can contribute the newick tree/annotation for it.

[0] https://www.onezoom.org/

[1] https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/argus/ottol@378964/...

Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#13

Post by ohyoutravel »

Love this. Also love that this is coming from someone with expertise who, based on comments below, takes quality seriously. Particularly cool when juxtaposed against one the other day “Any Human Ever” which was at first enthralling and joy-inducing, but upon deeper inspection was just a slop factory spreading misinformation across the internet.

Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#14

Post by Lucent »

culi wrote: post #12

Very cool. Perhaps you've seen OneZoom[0] already which is purely based on phylogenetic data sourced from Open Tree of Life. OTOL has been around for a long time. The project aggregates phylogenetic data from thousands of studies and creates a massive synthetic tree.[1] It's neat because anyone can contribute. If you find a study not represented in there you can contribute the newick tree/annotation for it. [0] https…

OneZoom is a great museum piece. Very engaging visualization that invites large touchscreen interaction. Impressive code behind it too for pruning offscreen vectors so the zoom stays smooth. On desktop however, perhaps due to my age, it gives me a bit of gorilla arm.

Thanks to open data, I offer the same node hierarchy of OTT, among 10 other backbones, but present it with 3 different (perhaps less dazzling) viewing mechanics switchable at the top: Icicle, which packs hierarchy into a fixed vertical height while allowing depth to stay horizontally reachable. Chronogram is the opposite, showing structure even 10 levels deep in a compact horizontal region, but at the expense of large vertical expansion. And Tree, the default, which is a compromise that can also show multiple winding paths simultaneously by folding them against the gutter.

I also focus less on the tree itself and more on trait overlay and rolling up thousands or even millions of species into compact segments so you can get a feel for how many chordates lay eggs or how many spiders are carnivorous at a glance. https://ptree.org/#OTT

Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#15

Post by Lucent »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #13

Love this. Also love that this is coming from someone with expertise who, based on comments below, takes quality seriously. Particularly cool when juxtaposed against one the other day “Any Human Ever” which was at first enthralling and joy-inducing, but upon deeper inspection was just a slop factory spreading misinformation across the internet.

This is the highest compliment, and I see why no other projects have tried to join all the different trees of life together or attach and reconcile traits. This was the majority of the project.

However, the unique "roll-up" visualization of traits brought in an interesting method of self-correction. For example, if any other phyla than the obvious 4 showed up with a single egg-laying species, I went back to the drawing board to find out where that incorrect join introduced the error.

Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#19

Post by jsphweid »

Neat potentially. But in "species or group" I typed homo sapiens and it loaded up that whole tree. I noticed that a sibling of human is "cumshot man." I searched this on Google and expectedly got porn results. Not sure why that shows up.

Re: Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

#20

Post by Lucent »

jsphweid wrote: post #19

Neat potentially. But in "species or group" I typed homo sapiens and it loaded up that whole tree. I noticed that a sibling of human is "cumshot man." I searched this on Google and expectedly got porn results. Not sure why that shows up.

This is vernacular picked up from Wikimedia commons for Homo rhodesiensis and its WikiData. It could be vandalism. I'll post to the Talk: and if it reverts, I'll reingest that source. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Homo_rhodesiensi... https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q131464

Edit: Regardless, I pulled it from production immediately out of an abundance of caution.

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