Google Maps like Matrix browsing

by Pulkit Goyal for National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

Matrices are basic data stores used throughout evolutionary studies. Large (1000 by 1000), collaboratively built matrices of quantitative/qualitative are becoming increasingly common on the web, and a generic mechanism to browse (interact) with these data in the browser via a "windowing" mechanism would be broadly useful. The project focuses on building an interface which allow users to browse large data stored in the matrices. With this, user would be able to see and analyse large data stored on the web. It requires to build a jQuery library that will produce a Google-maps-like tile based interface. Users can drag to area of their interest and can see the data more clearly. To improve the performance neighbouring shell should be loaded in the background. Although the original idea is to have the plugin load and visualize large matrices, a well built tool for this task could further be used to display more complex objects (e.g. heat maps, highly detailed images etc.) as these objects can also be treated in form of a matrix. Hence the aim here would be to allow an open format for the cell values (e.g. HTML div) that can be extended to allow any kind of data in the future.