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Welcome to Graphics Newsletter No 6! If you have not seen this Newsletter before and wish to get on the mailing list. please send your name and address (preferably by e-mail) to me. New readers are always welcome! New contributors are also always welcome!
The Advisory Group on Computer Graphics (AGOCG) had its third meeting on March 12th. Progress on assessing colour hardcopy devices is being made. We have agreed a short list and will be doing some hands-on testing of the devices on the short list before making any recommendations.
The Graphical Operational Requirement which we wish to see added to Computer Board and Research Council procurement exercises had its second revision. We received a number of excellent comments from the community which were much appreciated. We are hoping to finalise the document at the next meeting in June.
The recommendations of the SGML Workshop were accepted with only minor changes (see Anne Mumford's report). On the GKS front, progress has been a bit slower than we had hoped. The validation of the RAL G KS code has slipped a couple of months as has the incorporation of the GKS-3D code being developed at Manchester. We are still hopeful that the combined GKS/GKS-3D code will be available by the next academic year.
We had a first attempt at defining future work areas to get into once the current activities are stabilised. An initial short list to look at from some 50 suggestions was scanners, projection systems, NAG graphics, Visualisation, Slide making service and a Workshop on the Use of Colour. We would appreciate further suggestions. The aim is to put together a plan of future activities for the next two years.
We now have stronger involvement from the Research Councils. NERC has agreed to contribute to the activities and are actively involved in the UNIRAS training material developments. Anne and I visited MRC at Harrow and we have common interests in the area of workstations and visualisation.
One day training courses for UNIRAS version 6 have been set up for the following dates:
These courses will be given by Norman Wiseman of the NERC Computer Services.
The courses will be an intensive overview of the facilities and will be given as a lecture. Examples will be given but the course will not include a practical element.
Application forms have been distributed to sites but if you have not got one and wish to attend please contact Anne Mumford.
The CGM Technologies PC tools for checking and viewing metafiles are being made available following a CHEST deal. Watch out for the details being circulated. These will be useful tools for helping sort out metafiles that don't work and being able to prepare any bug reports if necessary for the variety of software which now supports the CGM standard.
A technical report which compares and contrasts the X-11 and the Computer Graphics Interface (CGI) standards has been written by Professor David Arnold from the University of East Anglia for the SERC. This AGOCG Technical Report is available from Anne Mumford.
Steve Morgan from Liverpool University has joined the IGWP, and, I anticipate, will play a key part in its future. The membership is currently:
There is excellent cross representation on the Working Party with many other bodies, including AGOCG, IDIC, BCS Displays Group, IUSC CAD/CAM and Workstations WPs, UNIRAS User Group.
The IGWP held a meeting in March at Pericom's headquarters near Milton Keynes, and we thank them for their excellent hospitality. Work progresses in a number of areas:
Readers of the Graphics Newsletter might wish to know that within the Computer Graphics Group in Sheffield University, we are setting up VisLab, a University-wide visualisation facility. The initial target audience will be scientists and researchers within the University whose work involves large and/or complex numerical datasets, but whose current visualisation tools are inadequate for their needs. The long-term goal is to establish the group as a major player in the visualisation arena, via collaboration with various departments, both within and outside the University.
At present, we are working on molecular modelling with members of the Chemistry Department. Mark Fuller, second year postgrad, is working with Prof J Swithenbank of Chemical Engineering and Fuel Technology investigating new techniques for the display and interpretation of CFD data. He is particularly interested in the use of perceptually linear colour spaces and interaction for visualising such data. Klaus de Geus, who has joined us recently, is opening contacts with the Radiology staff at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, with a view to developing new 3D methods for visualising medical image data, as might be obtained from CT scanning or MRI. We are also talking to Applied Mathematics and Physics, and the Geography, Electrical Engineering and Biochemistry Departments have all expressed interest in our project.
At present we are running software developed inhouse, in C and Pascal, on Sun 3s and SparcStations, driving Digisolve Ikon 24-bit frame buffers. Animation sequences are facilitated by a single frame Sony U-matic video and we can also produce slides of reasonable quality. With a recent, successful bid to the University's own research fund and two further bids to SERC in the pipeline, we hope to extend our visualisation capability in the near future.
We call on other departments and individuals who are either working in the area of visualisation, or who feel that their research might benefit from the application of computer graphics techniques, to contact us, via me, at this address.
VisLabThe Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is a standard for the markup and exchange of documents. A workshop was set up to investigate the potential use of SGML for the exchange of documents for the AGOCG. The workshop attracted 28 participants from the community and from industry and included a number of international experts in this area. The workshop was held 5-7 March 1990 at The Cosener's House in Abingdon and was sponsored by SERC.
The workshop recommended that SGML should be used for document exchange for AGOCG and that some work should be carried out to markup some typical documents. The workshop also recommended to the UK academic and research community that SGML should be investigated in some detail and that the definition of document types and tags required should be researched.
Copies of the proceedings will be available. Contact Anne Mumford if you wish to receive a copy.
There is an increasing need in the community for document exchange. The advent of bulk deals through CHEST has resulted in more uniformity between sites in the software they offer. That, coupled with the implications of an ever-growing range of software, hardware and number of users to support, means that there is pressure on Computer Centre staff to exchange material between sites. Through the efforts of organisations such as the AGOCG, we are seeing that the development of training materials for a large collection of software, such as the UNIRAS software, can become a collaborative effort with many people contributing. The results of this particular effort will be a wide range of materials (handbooks, exercise sheets, viewgraphs, factscards) which need to be distributed round the community. The combination of text and graphics, and the importance of layout for at least some of these, means that the output is likely to be on hardcopy (or pseudo-hardcopy as PostScript files). The results are documents which cannot be tailored into a house style or edited locally.
The availability of many documents in paper-only form or in a favoured local storage form (eg TEX or TROFF) is not a problem for many documents. The design of newsletters and bulletins is invariably best carried out on a DTP system with output going straight to hardcopy. It is when we get to the issues of having documents which:
that we begin to see the benefits of the SGML standard.
The papers presented at the workshop included overviews of the text and office standards (both ISO and de-facto standards) with particular emphasis on SGML. Also included were presentations of SGML software (DAPHNE from the German Research Network and TOLK from the Turing Institute) as well as experiences of defining document types and tag sets, such as has been carried out by the Text Encoding Initiative at Oxford University. The needs of the community for document exchange for integrated text and graphics were presented by some speakers and concerned the discussion groups.
The full papers and discussion group reports will be included in the proceedings.
The discussions centred round the question of whether SGML could be used for document exchange for the AGOCG. The groups all agreed that it was suitable. It was appreciated that people would still want to work on their own familiar word and text processing systems and that many documents would not be required for exchange. Where exchange of documents which could be subsequently edited, maybe multi-authored, and may subsequently have a house style imposed on them, then SGML was the answer.
The difficulties of defining suitable document types and a common set of tags was not underestimated by the groups. It was felt that the experiences learned from the DAPHNE software should be fed into the work to be carried out. The input of the Text Encoding Initiative work was also valuable. It was agreed that AGOCG would carry out a demonstrator project to take material already under development and to mark it up using SGML. To do this would require the definition of suitable DTDs and tags. The documents to be used are: PRIGS view graphs, the RAL-GKS guide and the UNIRAS training materials (it should be noted that their publication via other means will not be delayed). Translators from these documents to other formats such as TEX, TROFF and DCF (as well as onto paper) would also be carried out. This work would be a useful pilot for the community.
The workshop concluded that the output had an interest for the research and academic community as a whole and recommendations are to be made to relevant bodies. The proposals recognise the need for expert assessment of the software which is available and for the needs of the community for appropriate DTDs and common tag sets for a wide range of application areas. The recommendations suggest that a coordinator and a steering committee is set up, along the lines of the Computer Algebra Project, to look at these issues. Members of the workshop also appreciated the need for awareness courses and recommended that a number of courses are set up. The SERC volunteered to set these up as part of their training programme. A provisional date has been set for the first course on 15 June at Manchester University. Contact me in the first instance for details of where to obtain information.
BCS Displays Group Meeting, 28 February 1990
On 7 February 1904 a fire broke out in the business district of Baltimore, USA. It quickly outgrew the local brigade's fire-fighting capacity and the neighbouring towns sent help. Alas, this was to no avail: with over 600 different hose fittings used in the USA in those days, all this army of firemen could do was to watch Baltimore burn down.
In her introductory talk, Dr Anne Mumford used this dramatic example to stress that standards are important, and in computing of today no less than in fire-fighting of 1904. Although the standardisation process is slow, the standards often tom between opposing demands from the communities involved, we are now at a stage where standards interchange is the only way forward. The world of isolated systems and applications can be left behind, but only if purchasers include standards conformance into their procurement policy requirements.
This message was echoed in many talks of the day. Dr Jon Owen of the CAD-CAM Data Exchange Centre highlighted the difficulties in the drafting of an International Standard. The Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (or STEP) seeks to replace no less than five existing national specifications in an environment where data has to be kept from the design to decommissioning of, say, a nuclear power station.
The complexities of this problem can only be understood when proliferation of standards is considered. SGML (Standard Mark Up Language) and its near-rival ODA (Office Document Architecture) have both emerged in a more mundane world of text processing and document exchange, yet the relationship between the two - as Paul Ellison and Heather Brown pointed out in their talks - is not quite resolved.
Even when a standard is popular and simple, as Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is, there is still room for confusion. With the de facto standards like PostScript existing in the same arena the application domains easily overlap and, to quote from Alan Francis's talk, horses for courses comparisons result.
It is precisely the problem of awareness and need for interworking of the existing standards that the ESRPIT funded ARGOSI project sets out to address. Prof David Duce from RAL explained how through understanding of the requirements computer graphics places on networking, ARGOS I aims to influence both the standardisation process and the acceptance of standards.
An even stronger incentive for standard interchange comes from the US Department of Defense. Their CALS procurement policy is pledging all of its considerable buying power to promote use of standards. Norman Harris from Procad Ltd underlined that in all contracts let in 1990 and beyond CALS preferred standards will be mandatory. This effectively forces the suppliers to toe the line and offers a ray of hope. After all these years standards are, perhaps, on the verge of achieving more than equal misery in place of equal satisfaction.
