Brief reports
WordCloud: a Cytoscape plugin to create a visual semantic summary of networks
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* Corresponding author: Layla Oesper layla@cs.brown.edu
1 Department of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
2 The Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
3 Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Source Code for Biology and Medicine 2011, 6:7 doi:10.1186/1751-0473-6-7
Published: 7 April 2011Abstract
Background
When biological networks are studied, it is common to look for clusters, i.e. sets of nodes that are highly inter-connected. To understand the biological meaning of a cluster, the user usually has to sift through many textual annotations that are associated with biological entities.
Findings
The WordCloud Cytoscape plugin generates a visual summary of these annotations by displaying them as a tag cloud, where more frequent words are displayed using a larger font size. Word co-occurrence in a phrase can be visualized by arranging words in clusters or as a network.
Conclusions
WordCloud provides a concise visual summary of annotations which is helpful for network analysis and interpretation. WordCloud is freely available at http://baderlab.org/Software/WordCloudPlugin webcite