CSViewer for Analysts: I. Building an Integrative Database and Knowledge Model for the Cayo Santiago Rhesus Macaque Colony and Its Derived Skeletal Collections

Abstract

The Cayo Santiago rhesus colony and its derived skeletal collections provide abundant data made available since its founding in 1938. A project supported by an NSF collaborative grant has been committed to building a database that integrates the genetic and age-related information of the colony, together with social group interactions and environmental effects, aiming to provide a knowledge model to researchers with insights from this powerful non-human data repository for analyzing human conditions including growth, development, adaption, resilience, aging, and disease in a contextualized manner. This paper introduces CSViewer for Analysts, a computer application that provides user-friendly tools for researchers to access the integrated database and to generate a variety of visuals encompassing matrilineal or patrilineal family lines, social groups, time spans, phenotypic measurements, and photos recently collected through this project. Adopting Java-based technologies and third-party libraries for data analytics and visualization, CSViewer can help its users select meaningful datasets using various criteria, conduct data analytics and visualization tasks, and manage their “project artifacts” (such as selected datasets, models, and charts, etc.). Version 1.0 of the CSViewer app has been tested by collaborators and in a workshop by a limited number of researchers and science educators since 2023. Based on users' feedback, additional features have been implemented in version 1.1.0, and more features are planned for subsequent subversions with bundles for researchers to download and explore.