Understanding interactions between multiple organisms in an ecosystem is at the core of studies in ecology and biology. GloBI Explorer is an interactive tool to visually explore species interactions and food webs. The data comes from Global Biotic Interactions, which provides access to species association data through aggregation of various biotic interaction.
The infrastructure and service provided by Global Biotic Interactions aims to aid biologists to focus on gathering new interaction data. By providing easy access to biotic interaction data, the project provides an educational resource to better understand and better preserve our ecosystems.
The data utilized in this project is based on the Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) API, designed to provide access to interaction data for the purpose of integrating the data into wikis, custom webpages or other interaction exploration tools. GloBI is funded by EOL's Rubenstein Fellowship Program.
This project was developed by a team of students taking the Information Visualization MOOC, which is part of Indiana University's Online Data Science Program. The course provides an overview about the state of the art in information visualization and teaches the process of producing effective visualizations that take the needs of users into account.