Visual Exploration of Biomedical Databases

In recent years the amount of public biomedical data has increased dramatically. Improving understanding of these vast, ever-growing repositories of information through visual methods is thus increas-ingly important for biomedical research. A new approach is of-fered for visualizing a query-based subset of the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s databases. These databases are modeled as an entity-relation graph, and the graph structure is ex-ploited using a graph-based data collection tool. To collect data, users specify a query search string and a data collection path. The resulting data is then visualized using an implementation of user-dened semantic substrates. Comments from domain experts indi-cate that this visualization method is potentially advantageous for biomedical knowledge exploration. 1