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Lucentyesterday at 10:39 PM1 replyview on HN

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


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culitoday at 2:32 AM

Yes I saw the OTT tab after I left my comment. Mostly I wanted to take the opportunity to sing the praises of the OTT project

ptree is a very cool project! I'm a believer in the idea of mixing phylogenetic trees and trait tables. In tomato breeding, there is a lot of attention paid to closely related species as they hybridize quite readily. Being able to represent the phylogenetic relationships alongside their traits, habitats, etc is an extremely useful data visualization strategy. I actually made a tool to automate making charts like these but I don't think it's mature enough to share yet

Anyhow really great work on the project