Phylogenetic Trees: An Information Visualisation Perspective

The development of powerful visualisation tools is a major challenge in bioinformatics. Phylogenetics, a field with a growing impact on a variety of life science areas, is experiencing an increasing but poorly met requirement for software supporting the advanced visualisation of phylogenetic trees. Visualisation problems within the domain are commonly experienced by its researchers, but are poorly documented. Furthermore, the applications in the domain have not been reviewed from an information visualisation perspective. In this paper, the problems are defined and the methods employed by phylogenetic applications are reviewed with respect to related research within information visualisation. The results of a survey of the visualisation needs of phylogenetics researchers are also presented. The full version of this report is available at http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~scarrizo.