alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Interactive Tree of Life
Ptree consolidates of 11 taxonomic trees, both categorical like we used in school (plant, animalia) and phylogenetic (evolutionary descent), with instant crosswalk between them.
Across those trees it overlays 41 visual properties (categorical and numerical) assembled from hundreds of biological traits and sources. Color the tree by habitat, nutrition, size, longevity, even see vertical range of birds and depth of fish visually.
The backend is 800 GB of raw data distilled through a 9-step build process that reconciles and links all 11 trees along with hundreds of traits so every node in every tree gets all the properties. Every color and number presented retains and shows its provenance: original wording, citation, and license.
The frontend uses a custom Miller column implementation with fold-away gutter, all composited animation (no frameworks, pure DOM mutation). Use +'s to try to confuse it by expanding many branches and it will fold them away and route edges around them.
Made by the creator of ptable.com, a popular interactive periodic table website around since 1997.
Comments
Super cool! I just learned about 'incertae sedis' from here—though I think these things should at least be in their kingdom (e.g. Naldaviricetes are clearly viruses no?)
> Made by the creator of ptable.com, a popular interactive periodic table website around since 1997.
Discussed a few times over the years!
Interactive Periodic Table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27650576 - June 2021 (22 comments)
Dynamic Periodic Table (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495105 - July 2019 (21 comments)
Worlds Best Periodic Table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378346 - Aug 2012 (5 comments)
Dynamic Periodic Table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3199922 - Nov 2011 (20 comments)
Dynamic/Interactive Periodic Table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193431 - March 2010 (2 comments)
Great design, very snappy. Fun to browse and learn about species I didn't know exist and see how species are related to each other.
Tufte would love this interface; it packs a ton of info, but is easy to use and understand.
Some of the mouse-overs don't seem to match, hovering over 'viruses' shows a raccoon, and hovering over 'lungfish' shows a bird eating a fish
Nice! One thing I am missing is an easy „go up” a taxonomy group.
Love this. Also love that this is coming from someone with expertise who, based on comments below, takes quality seriously. Particularly cool when juxtaposed against one the other day “Any Human Ever” which was at first enthralling and joy-inducing, but upon deeper inspection was just a slop factory spreading misinformation across the internet.
Very cool. Perhaps you've seen OneZoom[0] already which is purely based on phylogenetic data sourced from Open Tree of Life. OTOL has been around for a long time. The project aggregates phylogenetic data from thousands of studies and creates a massive synthetic tree.[1] It's neat because anyone can contribute. If you find a study not represented in there you can contribute the newick tree/annotation for it.
[0] https://www.onezoom.org/
[1] https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/argus/ottol@378964/...