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.
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?)
Absolutely agree with the underlying UX point. "Incertae sedis" shouldn't leave you unable to tell what broad kind of organism you're looking at.
I do filter structural junk per backbone, but only from evidence that backbone itself supplies: synonym/accepted status, "not-a-taxon", environmental, hidden, unplaced flags. I also insert neutral buckets such as "classes (no phylum)" where ranks are skipped, so thousands of taxa don't spill into one flat level.
What I deliberately don't do is move a taxon to the parent that I think makes more biological sense. Ptree (Ptable gets the same kind of requests to classify metalloids) is downstream of academic taxonomic authorities operating under something like Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. It can expose disagreement among authorities, but it shouldn't quietly become another undocumented taxonomy.
Naldaviricetes is a good example. It is unquestionably a class of viruses, but "Viruses" is not necessarily its formal kingdom. ICTV currently leaves it unassigned to a realm, kingdom, or phylum so Ptree's ICTV backbone places it directly beneath a display root called Viruses. NCBI places it beneath "Viruses incertae sedis," while GBIF supplies it without that viral higher lineage, producing the confusing placement you found.
The tree map folding is ingenious. I have never seen it.
As a whole it's brilliant and humbling. Both the vastness and complexity of nature and biology on Earth, and also the absurd amount of work and human lifetime that has been spent on gathering the information. It's also a testament of the power of Wikipedia.
The problem with rolling up 2.2 million species into 7 kingdoms is it surfaces data quality issues loudly. Ranking photos by popularity means one node mismatch in millions due to a homonym will send that up from 10 levels deep. As I find these, I'm trying to squash them.
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/...
> 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)
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?)
Absolutely agree with the underlying UX point. "Incertae sedis" shouldn't leave you unable to tell what broad kind of organism you're looking at.
I do filter structural junk per backbone, but only from evidence that backbone itself supplies: synonym/accepted status, "not-a-taxon", environmental, hidden, unplaced flags. I also insert neutral buckets such as "classes (no phylum)" where ranks are skipped, so thousands of taxa don't spill into one flat level.
What I deliberately don't do is move a taxon to the parent that I think makes more biological sense. Ptree (Ptable gets the same kind of requests to classify metalloids) is downstream of academic taxonomic authorities operating under something like Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. It can expose disagreement among authorities, but it shouldn't quietly become another undocumented taxonomy.
Naldaviricetes is a good example. It is unquestionably a class of viruses, but "Viruses" is not necessarily its formal kingdom. ICTV currently leaves it unassigned to a realm, kingdom, or phylum so Ptree's ICTV backbone places it directly beneath a display root called Viruses. NCBI places it beneath "Viruses incertae sedis," while GBIF supplies it without that viral higher lineage, producing the confusing placement you found.
Tufte would love this interface; it packs a ton of info, but is easy to use and understand.
The tree map folding is ingenious. I have never seen it.
As a whole it's brilliant and humbling. Both the vastness and complexity of nature and biology on Earth, and also the absurd amount of work and human lifetime that has been spent on gathering the information. It's also a testament of the power of Wikipedia.
The gutter fold is entirely custom and took a month to get right. Try a link like this to see how the lines fold around each other in the gutter so hierarchy is preserved. https://ptree.org/#GBIF/Nutrition/42&view=tree&tab=wiki&open...
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
The problem with rolling up 2.2 million species into 7 kingdoms is it surfaces data quality issues loudly. Ranking photos by popularity means one node mismatch in millions due to a homonym will send that up from 10 levels deep. As I find these, I'm trying to squash them.
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.