Published September 18, 2008

Related sites: Informatics, VTK

InfoVis and Earth Kit

The Titan project with Sandia National Laboratories is focused on building informatics capabilities into VTK. There is now a mostly functional charting library in VTK based on Qt, which supports line, bar and stacked charts. We are working with Doug Gregor from Indiana University to integrate distributed-memory graph algorithms into VTK, and we are also integrating with Sandia's multi-threaded graph library. Current work on the geospatial view includes 2D projections, multi-texturing, and dynamic labeling. Many informatics filters and views have been made into in ParaView plug-ins which will soon be part of the ParaView repository, along with a new informatics-centric client called OverView.

One of the needs at Sandia is VTK interoperability with Matlab. To use Matlab code from VTK, we are developing a Matlab programmable filter for VTK, which can execute arbitrary Matlab code. To use VTK from Matlab, we are combining Matlab's extensive Java support with VTK's Java wrappers. While being developed with informatics in mind, this could be a powerful tool for anyone who desires to use Matlab and VTK together.

To learn more, please visit www.kitware.com/InfovisWiki and search for "Matlab Titan Toolbox" and "Matlab Interface".

A VTK render window and Matlab plot of the graph's adjacency matrix in the same Matlab figure. 

Multi-textured earth (right) composing a surface image (left) with cloud cover (center).