For a while now I’ve been exploring ways to navigate through DNA barcodes. Over the years I’ve built various “toys” to explore barcodes, such as Displaying a million DNA barcodes on Google Maps using CouchDB, built a small scale browser using Elastic search that had some succes, and discovered that Postgres can search for DNA sequences and it’s really fast. At the same time, I’ve bemoaned the challenges of getting barcode data into GBIF, and the current state of BOLD’s data exports.
Over the last few months I’ve been getting a project to the point where it’s usable, and today I’ve released a live version called BOLD view. Why make a portal to DNA barcodes when BOLD have themselves recently released a new version of their own portal you might ask? There are two reasons. Making my own forces me to explore the barcode data in some detail, which is eye-opening in places. The second reason is that I want to be able to explore the barcode data at various levels and in different ways. For example, I want an interactive global map of barcodes.
I want to see a DNA barcode in context, including a phylogeny that includes barcodes both within and outside the BIN the barcode belongs too.
I want to make the imagery more visible.
I want to be able to navigate the taxonomy underlying the barcodes using tools such as summary trees.
I want to be able to input a DNA search and quickly search for matches.
I also want to be able to connect the barcodes to the science behind them (who created the barcodes and what questions were they addressing?).
Abve all, I just want to be able to explore the data. I don’t want donut charts and dashboards. I want to be able to see the data and the connections. There is still much to be done, in particular I want to visualise sequence alignments. We can have a global map, and a global taxonomy, where is the global alignment?
I hope to work on BOLD view further, but for now it is out the door and my spotlight will inevitably turn elsewhere.
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