Hawkeye

An Interactive Visual Analytics Tool for Genome Assemblies.

Michael Schatz - Adam Phillippy - Ben Shneiderman - Steven Salzberg

Version 1.0 - March 5, 2007

Publication: Schatz, M.C., Phillippy, A.M., Shneiderman, B., Salzberg, S.L. (2007) Hawkeye: a visual analytics tool for genome assemblies. Genome Biology 8:R34.

Genome assembly remains an inexact science. Even when accomplished with the best software available, the assembly of a genome often contains numerous errors, both small and large. Hawkeye is a visual analytics tool for genome assembly analysis and validation, designed to aid in identifying and correcting assembly errors. Hawkeye blends the best practices from information and scientific visualization to facilitate inspection of large-scale assembly data while minimizing the time needed to detect mis-assemblies and make accurate judgments of assembly quality.

All levels of the assembly data hierarchy are made accessible to users, along with summary statistics and common assembly metrics. A ranking component guides investigation towards likely mis-assemblies or interesting features to support the task at hand. Wherever possible, high-level overviews, dynamic filtering, and automated clustering are leveraged to focus attention and highlight anomalies in the data. Hawkeyes effectiveness has been proven on several genome projects, where it has been used both to improve quality and to validate the correctness of complex genomes.

See http://amos.sourceforge.net/hawkeye for a complete description