An Experiential Approach to Interacting with Biological Information

Technological advancements in the life sciences have enabled biologists to generate high volumes of heterogeneous, multimedia data. The challenge today lies in correlating and integrating the information in ways that promote a holistic understanding of the underlying biological phenomena. This paper presents our research in designing an experiential information interaction environment for query-exploration of complex biological information. This entails development of a unified presentation-query-exploration environment that incorporates and relates multimodal data repositories and views. Specifically, our interface captures textual, sequence, and structural views of biological entities and presents semantic correlations between them using Gene Ontology annotations. Additionally, the system extracts and displays the spatial-temporal characteristics of the data to facilitate querying and discernment of relationships. The different views of the data are interactive, in order to facilitate information exploration and assimilation. Experiments and examples demonstrate the system’s features, efficacy, and ability to facilitate both concept discovery and information querying.