OverView Plugins

Overview

After an extended period of external development, the Titan team is now beginning to integrate infovis components into the mainstream (VTK). Along the same lines, we would like to convert our internal client-server prototype into a widely-available, parallel infovis application, tentatively titled "OverView". This document addresses some of the issues - particularly plugin-related issues - surrounding our goal of building a parallel infovis application atop ParaView.

In particular, we propose that "OverView" be implemented as "ParaView plus plugins" ... in the early stages, this would mean that we would simply be adding a new set of sources, filters, and sinks to ParaView, that could be used in the obvious ways. For example, there might be a "database reader" that produces a graph, a BFS filter that appends data to the graph, and a "graph view" that provides specialized controls and rendering for graphs. Users could instantiate pipelines in the usual ways, but with a wider set of data structures and views than before. This, in-and-of-itself, would go a long way towards realizing our goal of providing a marriage between scivis and infovis.