VO-enabling xmdv-lite

John Taylor

Institute for Astronomy

Edinburgh

xmdv-what?

A general multi-dimensional visualization tool from Matthew Ward's group at WPI

Not astro-specific

“lite” Java version

Uses parallel axes, scatterplots etc to help you get a grip on mind-bendingly high-D datasets

xmdv-why?

Why would you use it?

Parallel axes feature good for spotting patterns

Java Web Startable – click 'n' go

Lightweight

Integrated with the Euro-VO infrastructure via the ACR

See its big brother

xmdv-where?

“VO-enabled” version launched by Java Web Start from

http://software.astrogrid.org/votech/ds6/xmdv/

Get xmdv-heavy from

http://davis.wpi.edu/%7Exmdv/

List of non-astro viz tools at:

http://wiki.eurovotech.org/bin/view/VOTech/DS6SoftwareSurvey

DEMO

Lessons...

Connecting to the Euro-VO via the ACR is laughably easy....5 lines of code to access VOSpace (for Java apps)

Java Web Start makes delivering your app easy (even if it contains native code) & provides a convenient way of launching the ACR

Need to find a way of working with tool providers to ship astro-specific code in their products.

Interop with other Tools

PLASTIC – a specification to allow visualization tools to talk to each other

Contributing software:

Aladin, Topcat, VisIVO, ACR....

Contributing wetware:

Mark Taylor, Thomas Boch, Sebastien Derriere, Pierre Fernique, Noel Winstanley, Claudio Gheller, Marco Comparato, Bob Mann....

Enhancing Viz Tools

Mostly done by aggregation e.g. Plugins

Some move towards cooperation

e.g. VisIVO => Aladin

Equal but different...?

VisIVO

Topcat

Aladin

xmdv-heavy

RVS

PlasticHub

xml-rpc

xml-rpc

rmi

aladin scripting

It's intended to be easy...

Each tool need only speak one language (xml-rpc, java-rmi, CORBA (maybe), http)...

The interface the tool has to implement is very simple

Only specified the minimum to make it work, leaving most decisions in the hands of the tool writers

Plastic says nothing about the sorts of messages tools can send each other....future-proof.

Initial set of defined messages inspired by the Aladin plugin interface.

Now we're getting silly...

VisIVO

Topcat

Aladin

PlasticHub

PlasticHub

VisIVO

User1

User2

Python

IDL

R

Demo....

See me afterwards...

Contact

John Taylor

jdt@roe.ac.uk

Skype: johndavidtaylor

http://wiki.eurovotech.org/bin/view/VOTech/DsSixPlasticInterface

John Taylor

2005-10-05T15:13:22