VISTA: A visual interface for space and terrestrial analysis
Edmund G. Dombrowski, R. F. Dorsey, William A. Snyder · AIP conference proceedings · 1993
The VISTA system currently under development at the Backgrounds Data Center (BDC) will provide an interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) to perform queries, visualization and analysis of atmospheric and celestial backgrounds data.The VISTA GUI is designed to provide certain basic services for each scientific database. These are: (1) Specifying data selection conditions and geometry in an interactive graphical fashion; (2) Displaying metadata (information about data) for selected data including spatial, temporal, spectral, and other parameters; (3) Viewing selected data from an ‘Earthview’ (view of the Earth, satellites, and ground‐based observatories) and instrument platform perspective; (4) Displaying the instrument line‐of‐sight field‐of‐view; (5) Retrieving and displaying selected images; (6) Constructing data and image processing tasks via a graphical programming environment, for both interactive and batch processing; (7) Running and diplaying results of independent phenomenology and sensor models; (8) Allowing for direct interactive data analysis and processing through the use of IDL, IRAF, and other scientific analysis tools.The VISTA software system is being developed in ‘C’ and will utilize a number of tools to leverage the development effort. VISTA will have a MOTIF (X protocol) based interface developed with the UIM/X toolkit, 2‐D, and 3‐D graphics displays generated by both UIM/X and the GL graphics language, data and session management via a relational DBMS, and a data pipeline management system. The main goal of the VISTA development is to build a modular framework so that additional computational algorithms, image processing packages, and in‐house data models can be added or withdrawn without loss of functionality.Overal, VISTA operates as the front‐end for the selection, correlation, and manipulation of scientific data, both textual and graphical. The scientific benefits are best respresented by the fact that the user can visually query databases, view physical representations of resulting data, and interactively manipulate and analyze data items, all from a single, integrated GUI.