title: JSparklines: making tabular proteomics data come alive.
abstract: Perhaps the most common way of presenting proteomics data, and indeed life sciences data in general, is by using some form of tabular data. And while tables can be very informative and contain lots of information, the format can be challenging to interpret visually. An elegant and efficient solution is to extend the textual and numerical information with an additional visual layer, referred to as sparklines, making it intuitive to draw inferences about the properties of the underlying data. We here present a free and open source Java library called JSparklines (http://jsparklines.googlecode.com) that allows straightforward addition of a substantial list of customizable sparklines to tabular data representations, and we show examples of how these sparklines greatly simplify the interpretation of the tabular data.
authors.affiliation: Proteomics Unit, Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen, Norway.
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Barsnes
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vaudel
authors.forename: Lennart
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Martens
mesh_terms: D003626:Data Display; D030562:Databases, Protein; D040901:Proteomics / Q000379:methods*; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Bioinformatics; Data visualization; Open Source; Sparklines