Overview
Evolutionary and comparative analysis are important tools used for the annotation of genomes. These analyses are hampered by the diverse file formats used in computational evolutionary analysis and the inability of analysis tools to sync with one another. Visualization and data management applications that can overcome these limitations are valuable for NIAID researchers performing these analyses.
Comparative Data Analysis Ontology (CDAO), a data model developed and supported by the phylogenetic community, represents all the sets of concepts in an evolutionary analysis and the relationships among those concepts. The NIAID Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch is developing a Web application, Nexplorer3, using a semantic Web framework for visually manipulating comparative data in CDAO format and extracting biologically significant results based on reasoning. In addition, the ontology-based framework allows representation of data in different formats and improves interoperability of applications.