VisIVO Web Portal aims to create an astrophysical gateway based on the generic-purpose gUSE/WS-PGRADE portal family to access VisIVO software tools. It has been developed thanks to the Sci-Bus Project.

 

VisIVO is a suite of software tools for creating customized views of 3D renderings from astrophysical data tables.  These tools are founded on the VisIVO Desktop functionality (visivo.oact.inaf.it) and support the most popular Linux based platforms (e.g. www.ubuntu.com). Their defining characteristic is that no fixed limits are prescribed regarding the dimensionality of data tables input for processing, thus supporting very large scale datasets.

VisIVO Server websites are currently hosted by the University of Portsmouth, UK (visivo.port.ac.uk), the INAF Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Italy (visivo.oact.inaf.it) and in the near future by CINECA, Italy (visivo.cineca.it). These web sites offer data management functionality for registered users; datasets can be uploaded for temporary storage and processing for a period of up to two months. The sites can also be utilized through anonymous access in which case datasets can be uploaded and stored for a maximum of four days; to maximize available resources a limited dimensionality is only supported.

Assuming that datasets are uploaded, users are typically presented with tree-like structures (for easy data navigation) containing pointers to files, tables, volumes as well as visuals.

 

Files point to single, or possibly several (for distributed datasets), astrophysical data tables;

Tables are highly-efficient internal VisIVO Server data representations; they are typically produced from importing datasets uploaded by users using VisIVO Importer (see below);

Volumes are internal VisIVO Server data representations; they are produced either from direct importing of user datasets or by performing operations on already existing tables;

Visuals are collections of highly-customized, user-produced views of 3D renderings of volumes.

 

VisIVO Server consists of three core components: VisiIVO Importer, VisiVO Filter and VisIVO Viewer respectively. Their functionality and usage is described in the following sections.

 

To create customized views of 3D renderings from astrophysical data tables, a two-stage process is employed. First, VisIVO Importer is utilized to convert user datasets into VisIVO Binary Tables (VBTs). Then, VisIVO Viewer is invoked to display customized views of 3D renderings. As an example, consider displaying views from only three columns of an astrophysical data table supplied in ascii form, say col_1, col_2 and col_3, by using the commands

 

VisIVOImporter --fformat ascii UserDataSet.txt

 

VisIVOViewer -x col_1 -y col_2 -z col_3 --scale --glyphs pixel VBT.bin

VisIVOServer is distributed with GPL V.2 License for NON COMMERCIAL use. VisIVOServer is hosted by sourceforge https://sourceforge.net/projects/visivoserver/ and its source code is downloadable via svn:

svn co https://visivoserver.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/visivoserver visivoserver

 

Disclaimer: user data integrity is never warranted.