IDV Development Status Report

Don Murray
May 15, 2004

This report updates the status of Unidata's IDV development efforts since the last report.

Objectives

During the 1998-2003 Unidata proposal period, the MetApps project goals were:

Deliver turn-key platform-independent applications for the analysis and visualization of meteorological data. These applications must provide and extend the most important capabilities of currently-available applications such as GEMPAK, GARP, and McIDAS. Use of these applications should require no knowledge of Java or component architectures.
Deliver easily installed executables, user documentation, and test cases for the turn-key applications.
Identify or create a component-oriented framework that supports construction of custom applications from components used to build the turn-key applications. This framework should be useful to create new combinations of components that provide subsets of the capabilities of the turn-key applications, connect them in unanticipated ways, or provide tailored mini-applications for embedding in educational materials. Use of these components may require knowledge of component architectures or Java.
Deliver full source code, class documentation, and test cases for the MetApps components.
Enlist other developers in enhancing components and developing new components for the framework by providing an archive, mailing list, developers' forums, documentation, web site, and support for the components.

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) was released in June 2003 and is the culmintation of this effort. The IDV reference application embodies goals #1 and #2 listed above. The IDV framework supports the development of custom applications as specified in #3 such as the specialized IDV based visualization tool in the Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment (VGEE). Source code, documentation and example applications are provided with the IDV release. Other developers are starting to provide enhancements to the IDV framework (VGEE and EPA) and many of the items in #5 are already in place. The UPC is currently investigating ways to make it easier for developers to contribute to all software projects and the IDV development will benefit from such a system.

We feel that we have met the goals of the MetApps project in the timeframe specified and are now moving on to the next phase of IDV development.

In the Unidata 2008 proposal, IDV development will continue under the proposed Endeavor 4 "Software to Analyze and Visualize Geoscience Data". Under this endeavor, the following goals are outlined:

Supporting analysis and visualization of local modeling efforts (e.g., WRF and MM5 output)
Incorporating new datasets and data types
Exploring new approaches to visualizing and interacting with Earth system data, focusing on novel 3-D techniques that fuse data from multiple sources
Expanding IDV capabilities to support the creation of exploration based, interactive, pedagogic materials and integration with digital libraries.
Developing collaborative tools to make effective use of shared visualizations
Developing a framework that allows end-user assembly and integration of IDV components
Adapting to GIS frameworks (OpenGIS and ISO standards), content-based data mining, and other evolving technologies

Progress since last report

In March 2004, a new release (1.1 beta 3) was made available to the Unidata community. The IDV can be downloaded at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/IDV/.
Features added after the 1.1 b 2 release in October 2003:
- Continued enhancement of displays of Level II Archive Format in the IDV. Features include:
  - Arbitrary cross sections
  - Time/Height displays
  - Better performance
- Initial support for reading GeoTIFF data files.
- Preliminary Web Mapping Service (WMS) interface
- Beta version of in-display color bars
- Enhancement of derived quantities and formulas portion of IDV.
- Performance improvements
- General User Interface tightening
- Updated user and developer documentation
- A major internal refactoring of the code base was accomplished, greatly facilitating our ongoing efforts to acheive our next set of goals.
- Various and sundry bug fixes.

The first gathering of the IDV Steering Committee was a conference call on April 15, 2004. A summary is available on the Steering Committee Web log.

Presentations on the IDV capabilities have been made at the following venues:
- Don Murray presented a paper on IDV at the AAG Annual meeting in Philadelphia on April 17, 2004
- Don presented presented a poster on the IDV and participated in the Geoscience Education and Cyberinfrastructure Workshop, April 18 - 20, 2004.
- Don presented one of the Unidata Seminar Series presentations on the The Abstract Data Distribution Environment (ADDE)
- Don will present a talk and poster on the IDV at the DLESE Data Services Workshop in Durham, NH on May 25, 2004

Preparations are underway for a regional workshop at Millersville featuring the IDV as the focus. The workshop will entail two 1/2 day workshops on using the IDV and a 1/2 day of presentations by IDV users.

The IDV will be used in the upcoming Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean Experiment (RICO) next January. We will configure the IDV to support 3-dimensional real-time displays consisting of high resolution satellite data, S-Pol radar data, aircraft track/state data from the three aircraft and Mobile GLASS soundings. This will provide a unique and exciting opportunity for future scientists in the atmospheric sciences to interact with the latest analysis software in a field project setting. In addition, it will allow the software developers to get valuable feedback for future developments and for the new scientists to use the tool in advanced real-time and post-project analysis.

New development

Testing is underway for IDV 1.1 beta4 which will be released only to the IDV Steering Committee for feedback. New features include:

New map control which allows users to add their own maps into the system. This replaces the Map preferences.

New side legends. Steering committee will provide feedback on the usefulness and functionality of this feature.

New template framework allowing users to set up the properties for a particular display (i.e. 500 mb height display). This is sort of a subset of the bundling mechanism.