Taxon based search and visualisation allow users to display various types of graphical representations centered around one of several taxons of interest (cf. Taxonomy Management below for details about how MyGOD handles taxonomies). This is achieved through the use of a dashboard which can be reached either by clicking on the "Search by taxon" button on the home page, or by using the "By taxon" entry in the "Search" menu of the left sidebar. This opens the dashboard view.

The dashboard view is subdivided in two main sections. At the top, one or more Search Panels can be used to narrow down the search according to various criteria. At the bottom, the actual dashboard is a canvas where users can add/more/remove various widgets (mainly plots and maps) to build visualisations that best expose a phenomenon of interest.

A taxon search panel is divided in two parts. On the left hand side, there are menus for selecting one of the available datasets, as well as a specific date range. On the right hand side, a menu allows to select, if needed, a specific rank in the taxonomy that is associated to the selected dataset. By default, the Any item is selected, meaning that the search will return matches occurring in any rank. Below this menu, an autocompleting text field allows the user to choose any of the referenced taxons matching what he or she started to type (at least 3 letters). After defining the search criteria, clicking on the "Generate Dashboard" button will fill the dashboard with a set of predefined graphical representations.

In the screenshot below, the dashboard was generated after selecting the "ASTAN 16S 2009-2016" dataset, entering "Archaea" in the "Taxon" textfield and clicking on the "Generate Dashboard" button. Detailed explanations on the graphical representations that are generated can be found in the Dashboard Widgets section below.

The "Add Taxon Search Panel" button at the bottom of the Taxon Search section of the dashboard view will generate a new Taxon Search Panel below the previous one. This panel can be used to define completely different search criteria and to generate additional graphical representations in the dashboard. Each Taxon Search Panel has a specific border color. This color is reused for the graphical representations in the dashboard, and thus allows to easily identify which representations match a given Taxon Search Panel and vice versa.

When multiple Taxon Search Panels take up too much screen space, the "Toggle Taxon Search Panels" button can be used to collapse them.

Dashboard Widgets are graphical or textual components that can be added, resized, moved inside the dashboard canvas. Most of the widgets with graphical representation have an additional set of features that can be accessed by clicking on one of the icons on the right hand side, below the widget's top bar, as shown in the following screenshot.

• The leftmost icon with the sliders ("Tune Parameters") opens a dialog window where most of the parameters specific to a given widget can be adjusted (selection of a taxon in one of the ranks below the rank selected in the Taxon Search Panel, switch between taxons and ASVs, change to another size fraction, select another physico-chemical parameter...).
• The middle icon with with the arrow ("Download") allows to download the graphical representation (PNG or SVG formats), metadata describing the contents of the plot, and in some cases the data itself. (Currently, data is returned as a JSON file. Work is ongoing to provide data in tabular format.)
• The rightmost icon ("Clone") generates a new widget with the exact same contents as the current widget. This is mostly useful in conjunction with the "Tune Parameters" icon to compare widgets when changing one ore more parameters.

Relative Taxonomic Composition - Alpha Diversity

This widget shows a barchart with one bar per sampling date by default. Bars are subdivided according to the relative taxonomic decomposition starting at the rank defined in the Taxon Search Panel. The "Tune Parameters" icons allows to play with various settings, such as the taxonomic rank to use for the decomposition, the maximum number of bars to show in the plot, or the parameter used to build the bars (date, depth for example). The "Prev" and "Next" buttons at the bottom of the plot allow to move to the previous or next set of bars when not all bars are displayed on the plot.

To be implemented.

In its current release, each dataset has its own copy of a taxonomy. This is necessary to easily allow the use of several versions of a same reference taxonomy for different datasets. Frequently used taxonomies for metabarcode data imported in MyGOD are PR2 or Silva. When data is integrated in MyGOD, the table with metabarcode amplicon data also contains a hierarchically encoded description of a taxonomy entry. Hence, a dataset does not contain the complete reference taxonomy but only the subset matching taxons present in the dataset.