Viruses are highly diverse biologic entities. They do not share a single gene, nor do they have a common origin. Viruses differ extremely in terms of genome and capsid size, as well as in host range. Taxonomy of viruses is currently undergoing massive changes, including taxa reassignment, renaming and creating new taxa of higher level from the lower ones.

The number of new viral taxa is constantly growing and each new one presents another example of pushing the limits and balancing at the edge of survival by co-evolving with a host.

To explore and understand the limits of different viral characteristics we first applied categorization according to the type of genome and host, as most fundamental. It allowed creation of small manageable groups related by content, instead of a long alphabetical list of all viruses.

Viral family is the highest level of virus taxonomy, covering most of viral species currently recognized by International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Each viral family has its unique set of characteristics and is used as unit of information in V-table.

The interactive database of viruses allows observing trends in viral diversity by grouping viruses of particular type of genome and host further according to the type of capsid symmetry, size of genome and capsid. The structure of V-table is based on placing viruses with similar characteristics of genome and capsid near each other to reveal trends in viral diversity and simplify learning virology.

The new approach in understanding virosphere is to combine viral taxonomy, phylogeny and molecular characteristics.