Data Explorer
URL : http://www.opendx.org/
Description
Data Explorer is a visualization environment that provides for flexible
application of visualization and data exploration capabilities to a
wide variety of technical fields. This application permits users
to manipulate, render, and animate 2D and 3D datasets, and to generate
a wide variety of standard visualization representations of data,
including those data representations commonly encountered in
earthquake-engineering settings. Data Explorer includes an
easy-to-use graphical interface, and can be extended using visual
programming techniques, or using a conventional Applications
Programming Interface (API).
OpenDX is the public-domain version of Data Explorer, and this
open-source effort includes and extends the features of IBM's
commercial product. Since 1999, when IBM released this product
into the public domain,
great progress has been made in extending the Data Explorer product
into its current incarnation as the OpenDX visualization framework.
Features
Data Explorer includes both visualization and programming capabilities,
so that engineers can utilize this application to render and manipulate
datasets, and also to create custom visualization applications.
This product utilizes client-server model to permit large datasets to
be rendered remotely, so that a desktop computer used by an engineer
can readily be used in conjunction with a remote supercomputer to
visualize datasets, with the complex remote rendering performed by the
supercomputer, and the local rendering performed by an OpenGL graphics
card within the desktop computer.
Data Explorer includes a variety of built-in data handling
capabilities, including the ability to read and manipulate standard
data formats (e.g., HDF, netCDF), and capabilities for exporting images
and animations in a variety of standard formats (e.g., TIFF, GIF).
Pricing and Software Metrics
- Supported platforms include all major Unix platforms, as well as
Windows and Macintosh (OS X) desktop microcomputers. Windows and
Mac users can purchase (at nominal cost) CD-based versions of OpenDX in
order to avoid the effort of building the OpenDX system locally as a
native Unix application.
- Software quality is of the Community grade, but that quality is
rapidly approaching Commercial grade, due to the product's origins as a
commercial IBM product.
- OpenDX is a free open-source product available for download at
the URL given above.