Object-oriented semantic data flow system for scientific visualization
Jiaoying Shi, Wenli Cai · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
At present, most visualization tools have applied the traditional flat sequential file for handling scientific data. This results in inefficient and ineffective in storage, access and ease-of-use for large complex data set especially for applications like scientific visualization. The available data models for scientific visualization, including CDF, netCDF and HDF, only supported some common data types. The relationship among data is not considered. But it is important for revealing the insight of scientific data set. In this paper, we presented an architecture of object-oriented semantic data flow system (OSDF). OSDF concentrated on the scientific data representation and access in data flow system. Scientific Data Model (SDM) was put forward to model scientific data set. In SDM, the semantics of data were described by the Association and Data Constructor. Association was used to describe the relationship among data and data constructor to construct new data type. All data objects of an application were stored in object base. Data were organized and accessed by its semantics. An interface to access data in object base was supplied. To attain the best visualization effect, rules and principles for selecting visualization techniques were integrated into data object.