AGOCG held a workshop in mid-February on this topic. At this we addressed issues to do with the potential applications for the Web including teaching, distance learning, MIS, information delivery and access as well as issues relating to the national and local infrastructure requirements. The recommendations of this workshop, which will be considered by AGOCG, are included in this issue.
We now have software agreements in place for image processing software. It has been suggested that we should look at the area of photo retouch and image enhancement software to complement the image processing software. Clearly this would be applicable for scientific and artistic applications. Does anyone have any interest in getting involved in an evaluation or any experience that they could share with others?
A series of Case Studies of the use of IT in Art and Design has been collated and is available as Technical Report 26.
I have also just distributed a report on Colour Management Systems as part of the HitchHikers Guide to Graphics. If you do not receive this and would like a copy of the report, please let me know.
I have the notes from the course held at Edinburgh University on the topic of Graphics Programming Tools. If you would like a copy of these then get in touch.
I conducted a survey of the use of software in the art and design area (which is very broad). I received 41 responses from 29 sites. 64 software items were listed (I excluded the more general purpose packages such as word-processing).
The software items which were listed most frequently were: Photoshop, Macromedia Director, Freehand, PageMaker, 3D Studio, Adobe Premier, Quark Xpress, and Adobe Illustrator. All these were used at over half the sites. All were Macintosh software except 3D Studio from Autodesk which is used on a PC.
I am working with CHEST to ensure there are agreements for software in this area.
This is the report of the workshop organised by AGOCG as part of the Support Initiative for Multimedia Applications (SIMA) funded by the JISC New Technologies Initiative. The event was held at Loughborough University on 13/14 February 1995. The first day consisted of papers from experts in the field. The second day built on that through group discussions of the issues raised to result in recommendations to the community for activity and funding. The first day was attended by 80 participants from 54 institutions of whom 41 stayed for the second day.
This short article includes a brief description of the areas discussed and the recommendations of the workshop which will be considered by AGOCG and other groups able to progress these recommendations by resource allocation and/ or strategic directions.
The World Wide Web (WWW) provides a distributed multimedia hypertext system which can be used in teaching, research and for administrative functions. Using WWW we can:
Many institutions have developed Campus Wide Information Systems (CWISs) using WWW. Students can access resources from around the world to assist them in their learning. Also, and perhaps more significantly, a number of distance learning courses are now being provided on the WWW. Researchers are beginning to take advantage of control systems and collaborative tools which are emerging. Conferences, including reports, video, slide images etc can be published on the WWW, allowing greater and more rapid dissemination.
The WWW is clearly an important tool for many applications and is expected to be so for some years to come. This workshop was concerned with addressing the issues in the context of UK Higher Education and with making recommendations for activity and funding which would help UK Higher Education make efficient and effective use of this important tool.
Despite the apparent popularity of the WWW, many sites have not installed a server and most do not have well developed strategies. One thing which did emerge from the workshop is the need for support of those sites in developing servers and strategies based on good practices and experiences elsewhere.
There is a need to support the community in its introduction and use of the WWW. This could be achieved in a number of ways which might include: training; development of training materials; employment of people for specific tasks; ensuring dissemination of examples of good practices.
We should look to develop selfhelp on various aspects relating to the Web including:
We need to:
A mechanism should be established to provide exchange of information on institutional guidelines and good practices. These need to link to JANET Acceptable Use Policy and to UCISA Guidelines.
Legal advice on the use of network information should be sought and maintained. This might include taking advice now on particular issues in the absence of any case law. We should also look to set up some mechanism for access to ongoing advice and to keep a database of questions and answers. The CCTA mechanisms should be investigated.
Caching could improve performance at bottlenecks thus improving on efficiency and providing a cost effective way of delivering information. A national caching strategy and associated local caching strategies should be developed. In order to define the nature of this further discussion an evaluation should be carried out to define the location and requirements for caching at
We need to educate sites and individuals mounting information to use appropriate caching. This could be provided as an extension of the report by Brian Kelly on Running a WWW Service which is part of the AGOCG/SIMA output. We should document good practices.
We need to develop an indexing strategy to ensure efficient use of the WWW and thus of the network. We need to address how we can advise sites to link their information. There is a need for national indexing into UK HE sites with relevant information and links to site home pages.
We should evaluate relevant software and advise CHEST on suitable software for which good pricing structures should be negotiated. The software includes: document creation/conversion and management tools; graphics tools; gateways; collaborative application tools; quality; validation; clients, helpers and servers.
Quality of information is the key to the success of a WWW service. We should develop a code of practice relating to quality for providers of materials on the WWW.
We should encourage the production of good quality WWW delivered courses. We should also promote examples of good practices which are currently available. One possible way of achieving this recommendation is to offer a competition and prizes rather than tendering for good material to be produced.
We should ensure that there is a WWW site contact at all sites who can answer questions both within the site and from outside (along the postmaster model}. There needs to be local support at all sites.
The workshop welcomed the decision of JISC to join W3O and felt that the way the community can input ideas and receive information needs to be agreed and promoted widely.
The current list of SIMA reports is:
A couple of months ago I wrote a short article providing references to WWW sites for the visualization systems A VS, Khoros, Iris Explorer and IBM Data Explorer. Since that article two other servers have been established for the PVWAVE and IDL systems. These are as follows:
One of the responsibilities of the UK Advisory Group on Computer Graphics (AGOCG) is to stimulate and support the effective use of computer based visualization.
AGOCG therefore requested the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and the Universities of Leeds and Manchester and Natural Environment Research Council Computing Services (Keyworth) to conduct a review of visualization software, to help potential and actual users make effective choices.
The purpose of the work is therefore to review the current market for visualization software as it exists in the UK and to provide information to the UK Academic community for its visualization needs.
The following systems were reviewed (listed in alphabetical order):
The people involved with the review have produced a report containing information on all the above systems.
There are now well over 600 public domain AVS modules available. Trying to locate the modules associated with image processing or scattered data can be a time consuming task. In an attempt to ease this problem we have grouped together the modules into categories which make it easier to browse the repository.
The following URL references a page which defines a number of classification groups for the modules which are currently on the AVS module repository:
http://info.mc.ac.uk/CGU/AVS/summary/avs-group.html
The repository is maintained by the International AVS Center, North Carolina Supercomputing Center, US and is available via anonymous FTP .
In the OnLine section of the Guardian, 23 February, Peter Judge drew attention to initiatives currently underway to develop the Web by fundamental innovations in Web technology. However, the aim is keep the Web from being dominated by proprietary influences and ensure all users can continue to access it. A European project called WebCore has been set up with 1.4M ECU funding from the European Commission.
Tim Berners Lee, founder of the Web, formerly of CERN and now at MIT, has initiated a WWW Consortium with commercial and academic members. W3 has also been set up, which is a collaboration between projects in Europe and the USA.
Further details of WebCore and the W3 Consortium may be found at http://www.cern.oh/CERN/WorldWideWeb/webCore.html
Building a graphical user interface to application programs written in FORTRAN or C is quite an involved and time consuming task. There have been many commercial and public domain products in recent years to make this activity more manageable. In spite of the best of efforts, some of these software systems involve very steep learning curves, and thus have remained in the domain of a select few. In the context of teaching the rudiments of Gills, most of these systems involve a considerable amount of preparation both from the point of the teacher and the student. Also the available time in academic calendar poses another severe constraint.
The software developed by John Ousterhout in the early 80s provides an elegant solution to most of the above problems. It is called Tool Command Language (Tcl, pronounced as "tickle") and one of its most useful extensions called, Tool Kit. Tcl is a command language very akin to shell languages on Unix systems, and also a library. Tk provides various user interface objects which are reconfigurable interactively. The software is in the public domain (at ftp.aud.alcatel.com under tcl) and has been ported to several operating systems (various versions of DOS, VMS, not windows yet!).
Tcl is a simple language whose primary function is to issue commands to interactive programs such as shells, text editors and debuggers. It is also programmable which enables the users to write more powerful commands that can be added to the built in set. Tcl is also a library package that can be embedded in application programs. Finally extensions such as the Tk toolkit, provide mechanisms for communicating between applications by sending Tcl commands back and forth. Tk extends the core Tcl facilities with commands for building user interfaces, so that the user can construct Motif like user interfaces by writing simple Tcl scripts instead of C code.
This article gives a fore taste of Tcl/Tk with an illustrated example and considers its main advantages as a teaching tool. For a more extensive list of applications the interested reader is referred to FAQ files. (These files are also stored at the ftp site: src.doc.ic.ac.uk under /packages/tcl/tclarchive.
The following example illustrates some of the basic features. Note that the example by no means encompasses all the functionality offered by Tcl/Tk, and is used here to merely indicate what is required in building GUIs.
The following commands can be stored in a file, say power.tcland sourced with wish}. Alternatively, these commands can be entered (and modified as necessary) interactively in the wish shell.
1 proc power {base p} {
2 set result 1
3 while {$p>O} {
4 set result [expr $result*$base]
5 set p [expr $p 1
6 }
7 return $result
8 }
9
10 entry .base width 6 relief sunken
-text variable base
11 label .label1 text "to the power"
12 entry .power width 6 relief sunken
-textvariable power
13 label .labe12 text "is"
14 label .result -textvariable result
15 pack .base .label1 .power .labe12
.result -side left \
16 -padx 1m -pady 2m
17 bind .base <Return> {set result
[power $base $power] }
18 bind .power <Return> {set result
[power $base $power] }
Lines 1-9 define a procedure to compute $baseA**{power}$ and the language constructs are somewhat reminiscent of C shell. Line 10 defines an entry widget whose name is .base. The dot preceding the name refers to the root window, and in general a widget in the hierarchy is refered to using the full path where the component names are separated by dot. Lines 10-14 define the required widgets configured with the few options as shown. Line 15-16 define the placement of the widgets, .base, .label1, .label2 and .result} in the root window. The packer takes care of enlarging or shrinking the root window as additional widgets are defined (or deleted). Finally the bind command in lines 17-18, binds the X events to Tcl commands. In this example, when the user presses the Return key either in the entry widget .base or in .power the procedure, power is invoked and the result displayed in .result}.
More sophisticated interfaces have been built using Tcl/Tk and this short article can not do full justice to its extensive capabilities. Currently, I am working on providing a simple GUI to example programs supplied with NAG Fortran 77/90 Library, and the preliminary designs have been extremely rewarding.
One can readily appreciate its potential as a powerful tool both for teaching GUls to senior undergraduate students and postgraduate students; as well as for commercially viable products. One of main attractions of using Tcl/Tk for building GUIs is that the required programming is at a comfortable level, and provides a convenient transition path should the applications demand more specific functionality through the use of library routines and facilities to embed Tcl in other languages such as C, C++ and Ada.
VISINET is a European Commission TENIBC Project investigating Visualization and Virtual Representation across pan-European broadband networks. It was reported in detail in G&V Newsletter No 39.
VISINET was presented to the G7 Ministers' Meeting in Brussels 25-26 February. One of the themes of the Meeting was the Global Information Super-highway and the extent to which this can facilitate communication and business opportunities between Member States. VISINET was selected as it represents the state of the art in the area of collaborative design across pan European ATM networks.
The presentation was in association with Silicon Graphics, since all VISINET partners are using SGI equipment. SGI Inc (USA) were represented by Ed MacCracken (President), Bob Bishop (International President) and Tom Jermoluk (Vice President, Engineering). Also presented was the SGI link up with Time Warner and Ford Motor Company.
The conference will be held from 30 August - 1 September and will be preceded by two days of tutorials on Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 August 1995.
Template Graphics Software Appoints NAG as Master Distributor TGS 2D/3D Graphics Software to join NAG Math and Visualization Products.
Oxford, United Kingdom. December 15, 1994. The Numerical Algorithms Group Limited (NAG) has been appointed as master distributor for the full line of products from Template Graphics Software, Inc. (TGS) of San Diego, CA. Under the terms of the agreement between the two companies, NAG will market, sell and distribute TGS software products worldwide, excluding the United States, Canada and Japan. The agreement provides TGS with a master distributor for their overseas markets and completes the NAG graphics product portfolio, which now spans 2D data representation to very high end 3D visualization software.
The agreement with TGS completes our range of graphics and visualization software, said Brian Ford, Director of NAG, NAG is now able to deliver superior solutions to customers in the competitive numerical analysis and data visualization markets. Our existing relationship with Silicon Graphics to sell IRIS Explore (tm) is enhanced through TGS's OpenGL and Open Inventor products, and we look forward to better serving our mutual customers with powerful, integrated solutions.
TGS has been a premier graphics software tools vendor since 1982, and provides solutions to software developers who need to integrate 2D and 3D graphics into portable applications. The TGS product line includes FIGraph, FIGARO+, and OpenGL and Open Inventor, all of which are available on many different hardware systems, including Sun, HP, DEC, SGI and IBM workstations.
FIGraph, a two call 2D/3D charting system, is used by FORTRAN and C developers to quickly generate line, bar, pie and contour graphs. FIGraph is a high performance charting system that is used to represent complex engineering, scientific and business data sets. While FIGraph is available in support of graphics terminal and IBM mainframe devices, it is particularly well integrated into the X Window System.
FIGARO+, the world's leading crossplatform ANSI/ISO PHIGS+ product, is used to develop graphics applications in CAD/CAM, aerospace, military and industrial markets. FIGARO+ is a complete PHIGS+ development system for all workstation, mainframe, supercomputer and Windows NT systems. The FIGARO+ portfolio includes:
FIGARO+ is a PHIGS+ superset, incorporating immediate mode and quick update methods into dynamic and interactive 2D and 3D applications.
TGS is a source licensee of OpenGL and Open Inventor from Silicon Graphics Inc, and is providing these products on non-SGI platforms. OpenGL is a software interface used to develop 3D applications in simulations, animation and virtual reality markets: Open Inventor is a C++ 3D authoring system that is layered upon OpenGL. NAG licences IRIS Explorer, a sophisticated data visualization application built with Open Inventor, from Silicon Graphics Inc, making the TGS/NAG relationship particularly powerful. As a worldwide leader in graphics tools, TGS has a long commitment to our overseas customers, said Terry Baker, president of Template Graphics Software. We have selected NAG as our primary distributor in order to enhance our presence in these markets and to use their established reputation in scientific and engineering organisations to increase our success. Our charting products, combined with NAG mathematical software, and our OpenGL products, combined with NAG's Explorer products, make us powerful partners in growing market segments.
NAG have over 20 years experience in developing, porting, distributing and supporting scientific software. NAG is a notfor-profit organisation which supplies a range of compilers, tools, software libraries and associated products for the professional programmer and for educational and industrial use. NAG Ltd is based in Oxford, UK, with subsidiary companies in Chicago, Munich and Tokyo as well as distributors worldwide.
TGS produces open systems based software tools for application developers of Fortune 500, government, independent software vendors (lSV), and academic and research organizations. TGS has offered standards-based graphics tools since 1982 and is the leading independent software supplier of cross-platform graphics tools based upon PHIGS+, OpenGL and Open Inventor. Template Graphics Software, head quartered in San Diego, California, is a member of the ANSI/ISO graphics committees and the OpenGL Advisory Forum, and is active in establishing new standards and directions for computer graphics technologies.
The TGS logo and FIGARO+ are trademarks of Template Graphics Software, Inc, Silicon Graphics and the Silicon Graphics logo are registered trademarks and IRIS Explorer, OpenGL and Open Inventor are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.
The annual Conference of the Computer Graphics Society is to visit Leeds, UK, 25-30 June 1995. It will comprise a full week's programme of pre-Conference Courses, Technical Papers, Exhibition, and social events. The Conference is co-sponsored by the British Computer Society and the Virtual Reality Society and is held in co-operation with ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Technical Committee in Computer Graphics, and Eurographics. Future Conferences are planned for Korea (1996), and Canada (1997). Previous Conferences have been held in Australia (1994), Switzerland (1993), Japan (1992), Singapore (1991), and USA (1990).
Invited Speakers include:
There are 13 Pre-Conference Courses 25-27 June covering the following topics:
Courses are Introductory, Intermediate, or Advanced level.
35 Refereed Papers will be presented 28-30 June. These were selected from those submitted, by peer review of the International Programme Committee. The international representation in the papers selected includes the following countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, UK, and USA.
Topic areas covered in the papers include the following principal areas:
Other Conferences: