Open Tree Taxonomy browser

Our three major outputs so far are the synthetic tree, the collection of well-curated input phylogenies (with a graphical interface to the underlying github repository)  and the reference taxonomy. Up until now, there hasn’t been a simple way to browse the Open Tree Taxonomy (OTT). You could download the full reference taxonomy, or use the low-level scripting language in the source code, but it wasn’t easy to get an overview of the structure.

We have just released the first version of a browser for OTT. Each taxon page includes information about the input taxonomies that contain the taxon, synonyms, lineage, and children. Here is a sample page for Eukaryota:

To open the taxonomy browser, click on the OTT identifier from any node in the synthetic tree:

We hope this will make it easier to see how the taxonomy influences the synthetic tree. This is only an initial, rough, version of the browser – there is still much to do! The source code is in the opentree repository. If you have feedback or suggestions, please do  create an issue or see the list of existing suggestions using the taxonomy label.

January 11, 2016 | Categories: taxonomy | 1 Comment