xAnVi - An Extensible Visualization and Analysis Framework

xAnVi is an extensible framework for the analysis and visualization of graphs. The framework consists of a small core to manage resources, plugins and extension points and an arbitrarily expandable set of plugins to provide the actual application functionality. This paper describes the design approach to create a modular bioinformatics toolkit/framework for: research involving the dynamic and interactive visualization of graphs and networks; and biological networks analyses. In addition, two plugins for the interactive exploration of hierarchical networks are presented. The toolkit is available through the toolkit homepage (http://www14.in.tum.de/personen/griebsch/xanvi)