iMONDRIAN: A Visual Tool To Annotate and Query Scientific Databases

Abstract

We demonstrate iMONDRIAN, a component of the MONDRIAN annotation management system. Distinguishing features of MONDRIAN are (i) the ability to annotate sets of values (ii) the annotation-aware query algebra. On top of that, iMONDRIAN offers an intuitive visual interface to annotate and query scientific databases. In this demonstration, we consider Gene Ontology (GO), a publicly available biological database. Using this database we show (i) the creation of annotations through the visual interface (ii) the ability to visually build complex, annotation-aware, queries (iii) the basic functionality for tracking annotation provenance. Our demonstration also provides a cheat window which shows the system internals and how visual queries are translated to annotation-aware algebra queries.