부산대학교 도서관

Three years ago, the authors set up a project to provide graphical user interfaces (GUI) for visualization and analysis of oceanographic data. At that time, Interactive Data Language (IDL) from the Research Systems Inc., was chosen as the programming language to build the software. However, the need to purchase a license of the IDL environment prevented people from using such tools. This has severely limited the diffusion, utility and portability of the authors' project. The solution to overcome this problem has been to adapt their tools into a Web based environment. They describe the structure of their system that allows any user to make visualization and to perform analysis of data through the network. Briefly, data and IDL engine are hosted in a Web server and clients receive the output as a Web page with graphics. Thus any researcher may perform its own analysis or visualization without the need of having to additionally license the IDL package. The major difficulty they have found has been the interaction between the Web server and the IDL-written routines. The Object Oriented Programming capabilities of the recent ION-IDL have been a key point, because the tools are executed from very simple IDL batch files. As an interesting application they also describe the integration of their system into a ship data acquisition network during a field experiment. They show the case of the MATER-3 cruise where they could visualize any kind of data in almost real-time with the help of a unique workstation. At present, their system can only work with data visualization but the implementation for data analysis is undergoing straightforward.