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2. Architecture of the Visualization WWW server

2. 6. Visualization methods

Many visualization algorithms are mapping techniques. They extract certain features or properties and map those to a visualizible object (the term visualizible object was introduced earlier by [4]). Example for such mapping methods are:

This is only a small number of examples. Modular systems like our HighEnd flow visualization system [9] or the GRTools [15] are easily plugged into the JAVA visualization daemon, as their mapping methods are typically implemented within a separate module. After collecting experience with the prototype visualization server we intend to make the suite of mapping methods of the HighEnd visualization system available through a visualization system.

By integrating the HighEnd functionality into a WWW visualization server we can overcome a major disadvantage of the present system. Today the HighEnd flow visualization system is equipped with it's own rendering module. In order to achieve high rendering speeds this renderer is dedicated to specialized hardware. In our case we built upon Sun Microsystems XGL graphics library to drive our Sun workstation graphics. Through the visualization server concept we can make the functionality of our visualization tools available to user of non-Sun hardware. With respect of present network speed we expect the clients for the visualization server primarily to be within the DLR network. This allows us to concentrate our efforts on solving the technical problems first and deal with commercial issues and security consideration and load balancing at a later time.

Fig. 4: Downloading the result. The front-end applet forces the WWW browser to download the VRML from the visualization server which is automatically passed to the VRML Viewer