LepTaxonTree
LepTaxonTree is an interactive tree visualization program designed to facilitate exploration of the very large phylogeny of Lepidoptera. At present only the phylogeny can be accessed, but eventually the taxon names will be linked to other fields of the Lepidoptera knowledge base, allowing all of this information to be explored phylo-graphically.
The initial tree structure and taxon names displayed follow the Arizona Tree of Life project, supplemented by names from the ITIS data base (see below). This mostly provisional and substantially unresolved tree will change as phylogenetic research progresses.
LepTaxonTree requires Java 1.5.
Launch LepTaxonTree via Java Web Start.
About LepTaxonTree
LepTaxonTree was originally developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Its original application allowed browsing and searching of University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web database. The Laboratory of Molecular Evolution in the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology and HCIL have modified the application in order to display the phylogeny of Lepidoptera we currently have.
LepTaxonTree’s information is extracted from the Tree of Life (TOL) website’s XML dump once a week. We also use the Spire project’s OWL representation of the ITIS names database. The information is stored in and served from Sesame triple store repositories.
The TOL tree topology is currently shown by default, but ITIS names have been “grafted” onto branches (indicated by green arrows) where no TOL information is available.
Newick format
We provide three Newick files for LepTaxonTree data so that you may use them in your own analyses. Each file is generated weekly from our OWL data.
Download: Tree of Life, ITIS, Grafted (combined) tree
Thanks for pointing this out
Thanks for pointing this out, Andy. We’re still setting up our synchronization processes with TOL. Eventually we expect to share most of our information on at least a weekly basis.
There are several reasons not to simply link to TOL. First, we’re storing our tree data (and eventually almost all our other data)in a very different way than TOL — as an ontology. We’re using this ontology as we characterize each taxon’s biology. This is experimental and a subject of our technology research. LepTaxonTree works directly with our ontology.
Second, as we populate our ontologies with more information we’re planning to use LepTaxonTree as an alternate way to browse through most of the taxon-related information on our site (and others — including TOL).
Third, LepTaxonTree includes more than just the TOL tree. Some branches go all the way down to species courtesy of ITIS. We should be able to add alternative taxonomies in the future.
I’ll see that we get LepTaxonTree synchronized with TOL ASAP. Thanks for your patience.
tree data from TOL is not up-to-date
Nymphalidae is much further along on TOLWEB than is indicated by the resolution of the current tree, and has been since November. How often is the data updated, and wouldn’t it make more sense just to link straight to TOLWEB for that information?
Andy Brower
Dept. biology
MTSU