Last Wednesday, Dr. Byeougseob Ki from Syracuse University gave us a seminar on Scivis -- a Scientific data visualiztion tool.

This project is done by Dr. Byeougseob Ki and one of his graduate student -- Scott Klansky. The Scivis is 100% written with Java. So At first, Dr. Byeougseob explained the benifit of the Java.

Java(tm) is a simple, object-oriented, distributed, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, general-purpose programming language. Java has an extensive library of routines for coping easily with TCP/IP protocols like HTTP and FTP. Java applications can open and access objects across the net via URLs with the same ease that programmers are used to when accessing a local file system. Another feature of Java is that it support multi-thread programming. Threads allow you to do many things at the same time.

The basic elments of the Scivis is Window. The system can has as many as possissible windows theoretically. A window is assoicated with a name and some data. Users can use the "Copy", "Paste" methods to transfer data from one window to another.

Then, Dr. Byeougseob expained some other features of the system. They are:

• SciVis 2d colored surface plot showing a component of the metric for linear graviational waves
• SciVis control panel for 1d plots
• SciVis control panel to control contour properties
• SciVis picture showing that we can filter data (here we just are looking at a small section of the original data)
• SciVis: a filter was applied to a window to take the L1 norm which is what is being displayed
• SciVis control panel to remote-control the windows
• SciVis simple vector plot
• SciVis zoom up of the 2d surface plot

At last, Dr. Byeougseob gave us same of examples of the system. The features of remote control and 2D, 3D zoom are wonderful.