WordCloud: A Cytoscape plugin to create a visual semantic summary of networks

Abstract

Background: When biological networks are studied, it is common to look for clusters, i.e. sets of nodes that are highly inter-connected. To understand the biological meaning of a cluster, the user usually has to sift through many textual annotations that are associated with biological entities.Findings: The WordCloud Cytoscape plugin generates a visual summary of these annotations by displaying them as a tag cloud, where more frequent words are displayed using a larger font size. Word co-occurrence in a phrase can be visualized by arranging words in clusters or as a network.Conclusions: WordCloud provides a concise visual summary of annotations which is helpful for network analysis and interpretation. WordCloud is freely available at http://baderlab.org/Software/WordCloudPlugin. © 2011 Oesper et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.