NORMA 3.0: aesthetic and group-aware visualization and analysis of annotated biological networks
- 1Institute for Fundamental Biomedical Research, BSRC "Alexander Fleming", 16672 Vari, Greece; Division of Biological and Life Sciences, Mohamed bin Zayed Univers
Abstract
Interpreting a biological network often rests on the relationship between its connectivity and the functional groups annotated on it, such as pathways, complexes, or enriched terms. For example, whether a group forms a cohesive module, how groups overlap, and which proteins connect them. These relationships are often hard to assess visually when groups are numerous or overlap, and most tools represent membership only by node color. NORMA 3.0 is a complete client-side rewrite of its predecessors, delineating and laying out groups with convex hulls, bubble sets, or fog clouds. Multi-group nodes are rendered as pies and directed, and parallel edges retain their evidence channels. Eighteen 2D and nine 3D layouts are scored by silhouette width, outline intrusion and overlap, and benchmarked for group separation and run time. The implementation also includes edge bundling, network importers for six databases, 21 topological measures, group-level and enrichment statistics, comparison of up to ten networks, export of high-resolution images, and an Application Programming Interface. Availability and implementation: NORMA 3.0 is freely available at https://normaviz.org. The source code is available at https://github.com/PavlopoulosLab/NORMA.
Related
- ProLiVis 2.0: Literature-Centric Visualization of Protein--Protein Interaction Networks, with a Citation-Trust Model for Interaction Evidence
- Plant–Insect Interactions in Biological Invasions: From Classical Hypotheses to Multitrophic Networks and Biological Control
- A critical initialization for biological neural networks
- Harnessing the Intrinsic Dynamics of Biological Neural Networks for Reservoir Computing
- ProcessNets: Towards an efficient approach for ensemble analysis of biological networks
BibTeX
@misc{baltoumas2026norma,
title = {{NORMA 3.0: aesthetic and group-aware visualization and analysis of annotated biological networks}},
author = {F. Baltoumas and E. Karatzas and M. Koutrouli and A. Galaras and E. Aplakidou and I. N. Chasapi and M. N. Chasapi and P. Lazanas and E. Lamari and N. Przulj and I. Georgakopoulos-Soares and G. A. Pavlopoulos},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.64898/2026.11.03.763961},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.11.03.763961v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - NORMA 3.0: aesthetic and group-aware visualization and analysis of annotated biological networks
AU - F. Baltoumas
AU - E. Karatzas
AU - M. Koutrouli
AU - A. Galaras
AU - E. Aplakidou
AU - I. N. Chasapi
AU - M. N. Chasapi
AU - P. Lazanas
AU - E. Lamari
AU - N. Przulj
AU - I. Georgakopoulos-Soares
AU - G. A. Pavlopoulos
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/03
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.11.03.763961
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.11.03.763961v1
AB - Interpreting a biological network often rests on the relationship between its connectivity and the functional groups annotated on it, such as pathways, complexes, or enriched terms. For example, whether a group forms a cohesive module, how groups overlap, and which proteins connect them. These relationships are often hard to assess visually when groups are numerous or overlap, and most tools represent membership only by node color. NORMA 3.0 is a complete client-side rewrite of its predecessors, delineating and laying out groups with convex hulls, bubble sets, or fog clouds. Multi-group nodes are rendered as pies and directed, and parallel edges retain their evidence channels. Eighteen 2D and nine 3D layouts are scored by silhouette width, outline intrusion and overlap, and benchmarked for group separation and run time. The implementation also includes edge bundling, network importers for six databases, 21 topological measures, group-level and enrichment statistics, comparison of up to ten networks, export of high-resolution images, and an Application Programming Interface. Availability and implementation: NORMA 3.0 is freely available at https://normaviz.org. The source code is available at https://github.com/PavlopoulosLab/NORMA.
ER -