Semantic Body Browser: graphical exploration of an organism and spatially resolved expression data visualization

Abstract

Advancing technologies generate large amounts of molecular and phenotypic data on cells, tissues and organisms, leading to an ever-growing detail and complexity while information retrieval and analysis becomes increasingly time-consuming. The Semantic Body Browser is a web application for intuitively exploring the body of an organism from the organ to the subcellular level and visualising expression profiles by means of semantically annotated anatomical illustrations. It is used to comprehend biological and medical data related to the different body structures while relying on the strong pattern recognition capabilities of human users.

Availability and implementation: The Semantic Body Browser is a JavaScript web application that is freely available at http://sbb.cellfinder.org. The source code is provided on https://github.com/flekschas/sbb.