The Kitware Blog

ParaView 3.12.0 RC-3 released

David Partyka — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:05:22 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of ParaView 3.12 release candidate 3. This release can be considered a bug-fix release that addresses over 180 issues; the full list can be found at http://www.paraview.org/Bug/changelog_page.php?version_id=85. Binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems are now available for download on the ParaView download page and a revised user guide can be accessed on the ParaView Wiki, or in PDF form.

As Python continues to be one of the most preferred means of interacting with ParaView, release candidate 3 contains new support for creating animation tracks that use Python scripts to build highly-customizable animations. We’ve also added new capabilities to our plugin support, making it easier to load deployed plugins on server processes. All distributed plugins are now listed on the client side as well as the server side.

Updates have also been made to the streaming framework at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The multi-resolution view now adjusts the resolution to match the projected image size. Additionally, VTK filters can now modify meta-information, allowing users to modify data while the streaming framework culls and prioritizes pieces; for example, the new spherical warp filter projects flat data onto a globe while successfully tracking bounding box pieces.

Additionally, support updates have made for users of the cosmology and windblade formats. For example, the MaskPoints filter for placing glyphs, etc. was updated with new options for improving random sampling in parallel. VTK’s Gaussian Splatter filter was likewise exposed in ParaView, making it easier to visualize point set data with imaging filters. The cosmology and windblade readers have also been revised.

ParaView 3.12 also includes major improvements to the underpinnings of the ParaView ServerManager. The communication layer beneath the ServerManager was upgraded to minimize communication and make it easier to debug and track messages exchanged between the client and server.

Smaller yet notable improvements included in ParaView 3.12 include views now using caching to avoid re-renders from repairs due to menus and dialog popups on the screen; volume rendering of uniform grids to support shading; and the ability to enable specular highlights when using scalar coloring, etc.

The following updates have also been addressed since release candidate 2:

12670 SPTimeseries tests failing
12636 fix incompatibility with OCCT 6.5.2
12678 Build issues using external png on OSX
12667 cross compilation fails
12671 Prism now working correctly in client-server mode.
12630 Default PARAVIEW_INSTALL_THIRD_PARTY_LIBRARIES to OFF
12652 coprocessing writers menu is not enabled after creating a filter and hitting the Apply button
12650 Multiple file plot over line seg faults
12651 Crash toggling displayed variables plot over line.
12638 ServerConfiguration XML (PVSC) not correctly using random default values.
12626 remove cosmo plugin

We value your feedback. Please use http://paraview.uservoice.com or click on the "Tell us what you think" link on paraview.org to leave your feedback and vote for new features.

Scalable Visual System for Nonproliferation Analysis

Aashish Chaudhary — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:17:42 -0400

Nuclear nonproliferation is in opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons and technology. For the Phase I of the DOE SBIR “Scalable Visual System for Nonproliferation Analysis,” we developed a prototype of a system for analysts interested in retrieving, classifying, and visualizing large quantities of documents related to nonproliferation activities.

Our first step was to acquire the data from various sources and fuse them to build a proliferation database. We acquired hundreds of documents from the NIS Nuclear Trafficking Database (NTI). To collect these documents, we wrote a minimal website crawler using Python (pycurl and SGMLParser).

For a more substantial dataset, we collaborated with Juliana Friere (Professor, University of Utah). She and her colleagues used NTI as the seed documents to identify similar articles on the web using sophisticated web crawling techniques. We were able to extract relevant information from HTML using a custom algorithm developed on top of the open source tool BeautifulSoup.

Our raw data from the database was processed so as to acquire information pertaining to time and location of the event, people and organizations involved. To accomplish this, we explored the open-source Stanford Named Entity Recognition (SNER) toolkit and Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK).

We also investigated another method for extracting interesting information from our datasets called topic modeling. Topic modeling produces two kinds of result sets: words associated with topics and documents related to topics. We used these results to summarize the content of the documents and to produce links between related documents and topics.

In order to test scalability of the system, we ingested 560,000 abstracts from PubMed into the database with associated metadata in about 20 minutes, and named entity extraction in about 2 seconds per document.

Once we gathered all the relevant metadata, we developed an online system where users could issue a query and visualize the result of the query. This online system was primarily built on top of Midas using Postgres for the database backend, and Protovis and Google Maps API V3 for visualization.

Overall, we believe that we met all the criteria for the Phase I and developed a interactive, live system that could help analysts quickly gather and summarize information from large data sources.

Authors: Jeff Baumes, Aashish Chaudhary

Project Team: Jeff Baumes, Aashish Chaudhary, Nikhil Shetty

Kitware Entry a Winner for Tax Visualization Contest

Jeff Baumes — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:14:48 -0400

A few months ago Google and Eyebeam announced the Visualize Your Taxes challenge. The goal was to come up with creative ways to show people where their tax money goes using various forms of data visualization. I was excited to hear that my entry was selected to be among the six finalists in the contest out of 40 entries. My visualization centered on using a calendar to let people see how their money would be distributed throughout the year. There is a nice new Javascript library called d3 and in particular an example using calendars, which inspired my design. Feel free to take a look and try it for yourself (caveat: it will not function correctly in Internet Explorer).

The contest winners were discussed on the Official Google Blog, which spurred related articles on Mashable, Time Techland, Huffington Post, ZDNet and other places. There was also an online chat with WNYC's Brian Lehrer that I participated in.

VTK Archiecture Review Board

Jeff Baumes — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:18:30 -0400

I just wanted to take the opportunity to tell you about what has been happening with the VTK ARB (architecture review board). The ARB was formed last year to facilitate forward progress in VTK. It is a task force consisting of researchers around the world that was formed to work out the details required to make important changes, such as release schedules and moving to git repository. The ARB wants your input, and wants to be transparent about its discussions and decisions. A page describing the ARB is located at

http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/ARB

Scheduled meetings and meeting notes are located at

http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/ARB/Meetings