Looking for a Good Set of Wheels

1
Looking for a Good Set of Wheels

• Information Visualization Software Infrastructure
• October 9, 2004
• Andy Wilson
• Brian Wylie
• Sandia National Laboratories

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by
Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin
Company,for the United States Department of
Energys National Nuclear Security
Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.
2
Where am I coming from?

• We have an infovis application called VxInsight
• Force-directed graph layout
• Terrain metaphor node density as altitude
• Simple DB query capability
• Our customers want to extend it to do lots more
• We decided to rewrite it

3
This sounds like a job for a toolkit!

• Right now were using VTK and Qt
• They give us much of what we need
• Data flow model, extensibility
• Basic data structures and memory management
• Cross-platform compatibility (Win32, Unix, MacOS)
• Multiple language bindings (Tcl, C, Java,
  Python)
• Friendly licenses
• But not everything
• Strings as data
• Linked views (not easily)
• Trace, logging, and replay
• Common infovis components

4
Why am I here?

• We will be writing infovis applications for a
  long time. Reuse wheels rather than rebuild
  them.
• I believe strongly in releasing tools as open
  source whenever possible.
• Sandia is already doing this in VTK and Paraview
• A common infovis infrastructure is a big problem.
  I think this is a good start get a bunch of us
  in a room to discuss needs, problems, and
  perspectives.