The NIH Visual Browser: An Interactive Visualization of Biomedical Research

This paper presents a technical description of the methods used to generate an interactive, two-dimensional visualization of 60,568 grants funded by the National Institutes of Health in 2007. The visualization is made intelligible by providing interactive features for assessing the data in a web-based visual browser, see http://www.nihmaps.org. The key features include deep zooming, selection, full-text querying, overlays, color-coding schemes, and multi-level labeling. Major insights, broader applicability, and future directions are discussed.