Abstract

This paper describes a web-based interactiveframework for the analysis and visualization of geneexpressions and protein structures. The formulation of theproposed framework was encountered by many challengesdue to the wide range of relevant analysis and visualizationtechniques, in addition to the existence of a diversity ofbiological data types, on which these techniques operate.The main challenges that guided the formulation of thepresent framework are: (a) the integration of data fromheterogeneous resources, such as expert-driven data fromtext, public domain databases and diverse large scaleexperimental data sets, and (b) difficulty in integrating themost recent analysis and visualization tools due to the lackof standard I/O. Therefore, the fundamental innovation inthe proposed framework is the integration of the state-ofthe-art techniques of both analysis and visualization forgene expressions and protein structures through a unifiedworkflow. In addition, it supports a wide range of inputdata types and exports three dimensional interactive outputsusing Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) to beready for exploration via off-the-shelf monitors as well asimmersive, 3D, stereo display environments.