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viewpoints

high performance linked scatterplots and more

Viewpoints (vp) is a visualization tool for exploring large, multidimensional data. It enables rapid interactive analysis of data sets containing >> 10⁶ samples, limited only by available RAM, with an arbitrary number of attributes (or dimensions) per sample. Viewpoints was originaly created for analyzing data sets from current and upcoming NASA space science missions but it has now been used in areas ranging from aeronautical engineering, quantum chemistry, and computational fluid dynamics to virology, finance, aviation safety, and web server log mining.

Viewpoints does a small set of useful things rather well (or, at least, rather quickly). Its main feature is multiple linked scatterplots (in 2D & 3D) with overplotting and brushing. It also supports histograms with dynamically adjustable binwidth, several types of normalization (linear, logarithmic, logistic, trimmed, ranked, etc), equalization (gaussian, uniform, etc) and rudimentary forward search.

Viewpoints is designed to take advantage of the hardware accelerated graphics and fast processors on modern high-end workstations and laptops. It is written entirely in C++. It uses OpenGL for graphics, GSL for numerics, boost and blitz++ for data management, and fltk for the graphical user interface. It is highly interactive - most parameters are modifiable in real time with immediate visual feedback.

Viewpoints stands apart from other "multiple linked views" graphics applications because of its high performance on large data and its availablility on multiple platforms.  Viewpoints was originally written by Creon Levit at NASA Ames Research Center .  Paul Gazis from the SETI institute made substantial enhancements.  From 2006 to 2008 viewpoints development was supported by the NASA Applied Information Systems Research (AISR) program. In 2007, viewpoints was released under the NASA Open Source Agreement .