OneZoom is committed to heightening awareness about the diversity of life on earth, its evolutionary history and the threats of extinction. This website allows you to explore the tree of life in a completely new way: it's like a map, everything is on one page, all you have to do is zoom in and out. OneZoom also provides free, open source, data visualisation tools for science and education, currently focusing on the tree of life. You can create visualisations of your own data as well as explore ones we have made. Got any questions or feedback? Want your data to appear here on OneZoom? just ask us.
"Big data" is a growing issue in Science and Industry. Modern computing has enabled large amounts of data to be captured and stored and has revolutionised many branches of science. These advances, however, lead to challenges, such as how to explore and visualise large data sets. The very first blue-skies idea that could have been identified with OneZoom was that of a mind map so vast that it could contain all human knowledge. The concept involved making the information easy to explore by laying it out in ever smaller bubbles using a fractal structure and a zooming interface so that the computer never runs out of space to put the information no matter how much there is.
The idea was untouched for some time until one day, James Rosindell visited Charles Darwin's Down house with Luke Harmon who he was working with on a number of scientific projects. Luke in particular made a big deal of their walking down Darwin's thinking path and said that they should try to think of a new idea to commemorate the occasion. The below photo shows James (left) and Luke (right) in front of Down house, taken just after their lap of the thinking path. It is unfortunate that none of the ideas they discussed whilst actually on the thinking path have led anywhere yet, but it was less than two hours later when wandering around central London that the topic of tree visualisation came up and James suggested a possible way to visualise the tree of life based on an adaptation of his fractal mind map idea.
James initially worked on coding OneZoom only during his spare time, taking advice from Luke in particular, but also from many others. In recent months, he has made the further development of OneZoom part of his research program at Imperial College London, which is funded by a personal research fellowship from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). After a great deal of work, OneZoom is now ready for release. This is an ongoing project, there are many improvements, extra features and additional data that we plan to add to OneZoom in the future. We hope, however, that OneZoom will already be useful to scientists and interesting to the general public in its current form.
James Rosindell devised the OneZoom concept and developed the software. He received regular advice and support from Luke Harmon who co-author of the OneZoom manuscript. Yan Wong has provided advice, software for data collection and helped at events. Laura Nunes helped at events and wrote labels for the bird tree. Duncan Gillies assisted James Rosindell in the supervision and recruitment of Kai Zhong who is now a full time software developer for OneZoom. We would like to thank the below people (in alphabetical order) for their kind feedback, advice, suggestions and support at various points during the development of OneZoom.
We thank NERC for funding and Imperial College London for their support and webhosting. We are proud to now have Discover Life and Map of Life as a partner organisations.
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