by Jeremy Walton, NAG Ltd
The new release of IRIS Explorer, NAG's popular data visualization toolkit and application builder, is packed with exciting new features. Many of these enhancements have been added in response to user requests, but some of them break completely new ground for a visualization system, giving IRIS Explorer 4.0 features which are unmatched by other products in this arena.
For example, IRIS Explorer 4.0 is the first system to allow collaborative visualization. Here, users working on separate machines anywhere on the Internet can use IRIS Explorer 4.0 to build multi-user visualization applications. This offers support for teams of co-workers who are geographically disparate, but who need to come together to jointly examine and analyse their datasets. Working within IRIS Explorer's familiar dataflow pipeline, in which modules are connected together to construct the application, all team members can share data from any point in the pipeline, or share control over any of the constituent modules. In addition, they can pass individual modules or pipeline fragments to their colleagues, allowing direct collaboration on the construction of the application.
Collaborative visualization is useful in a number of areas such as teaching, helpdesk support or joint research. The collaborative functionality in IRIS Explorer 4.0 has come from work done at the IRIS Explorer Center of Excellence at the University of Leeds. More details of that research can be found in the article on COllaborative VIsualization in Scientific Analysis - COVISA.
Other new features in IRIS Explorer 4.0 have concentrated on the graphing of one-dimensional data - plotting y as a function of x. This area has seen considerable enhancement since NAG took over the development of IRIS Explorer in 1994. New features include logarithmic axes, independent control of plot colour, line and symbol style, domain specification, multiple curves (independently labelled) on one plot, and improved support for axis labelling. As well as appearing in new modules, this new functionality has been added at the API level, allowing users to create their own new modules for specialised plots. Other new modules have been added to layout multiple plots, and to provide high-quality printing using vector PostScript.
Data input and output have been improved as well. Along with the new modules for plotting one-dimensional data, a simple-to-use format for this data - Explorer Chart Format - has been introduced, together with a reader module. In addition, the close relationship between IRIS Explorer and VRML (IRIS Explorer is built using Open Inventor, whose file format is the basis for VRML) is enhanced in release 4.0 with improved output options for VRML 2.0.
Finally, IRIS Explorer 4.0 incorporates a simplified installation procedure and new licensing options for developers who are building applications. Whatever your needs, you will find something to help you in this exciting new release, which will shortly be available from NAG. So, why not take a look at IRIS Explorer 4.0? It's just waiting to help you!