Gosling Designer: a Platform to Democratize Construction and Sharing of Genomics Data Visualization Tools

TL;DR

Gosling Designer is a comprehensive platform that simplifies the creation, exploration, and sharing of versatile genomics data visualizations, overcoming existing limitations in customization, usability, data handling, and collaboration.

Contribution

The paper introduces Gosling Designer, a novel platform that democratizes genomics data visualization by integrating editing, exploration, and sharing functionalities in one accessible tool.

Findings

Supports diverse visualization types for genomics data

Reduces technical barriers for visualization creation

Enhances collaboration through sharing features

Abstract

Analysis of genomics data is central to nearly all areas of modern biology. Despite significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and computational methods, these technologies require significant human oversight to generate novel and reliable biological insights. Consequently, the genomics community has developed a substantial number of diverse visualization approaches and a proliferation of tools that biologists rely on in their data analysis workflows. While there are a few commonly used visualization tools for genomics data, many tools target specific use cases for genomics data interpretation and offer only a limited, predefined set of visualization types. Moreover, static visualizations often fail to support exploratory analysis. Developing interactive visualizations and tools typically requires significant time and technical expertise, even when supported by modern LLM-powered coding assistants, and the resulting visualizations can be difficult to share among collaborators. We developed Gosling Designer, an all-in-one platform for editing, exploring, and sharing visualizations of genomics data. Gosling Designer addresses four key challenges observed in existing genomics visualization tools: (1) limited versatility, (2) difficulty of visualization authoring, (3) complexity of data management, and (4) barriers to sharing and collaboration.