VIF Custom visualization tools provide usually provide superior support due to their focus on a particular set of end users. The challenge is to efficiently design and create such tools. Key issues are the number of complex components that are required for custom tools and the management of the interactions/communications among these components. For example, most tools have components for handling data input, graphical user interfaces and specific visualization functions. As the history of software engineering has shown, developing each of these components from scratch requires an extraordinary amount of effort. Fortunately, many components can be created semi-automatically, or already exist and can be reused. For example, graphical user interface builders are available, such as Builder Xcessory and UIMX, which allow a developer to interactively compose a user interface and generate the basic supporting code. In addition, visualization environments and libraries exist, such as IBM's Data Explorer (now OpenDX) and the Visualization Toolkit, which both provide visualization functionality.
Ideally such tools would meet a collection of requirements including easy reuse of components, easy extensibility, and support for several modalities (such as interactive, batch, run-time, post-processing and scripting modes). However, the standard compositional approach lacks formal interfaces and update mechanisms among component types, including the user interface components and visualization library functions that comprise a tool. We have built a prototype object-oriented design methodology and companion framework, known as VIF (Visualization Interconnection Framework) that supports the creation of formal interfaces and automated updates among the components that make up a visualization system. VIF supports the reuse of parts of a custom visualization tool and several modalities within a custom tool. Tool creation has been further simplified by integrating the framework into an automated user-interface builder. The TRex project is our first project to use the VIF prototype.
TRex Parallel VTK Viz Clusters Flow Query ("Qviz") POPTEX Wildfire LUX TERA Amer. Museum of Natural History
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