Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) UIWG Meeting Notes
Presenter: Woody Roberts
5 March 2004

Attendees: Joe Golden, Tom Filliagi, Jim Fluke, Cliff Matsumoto,
           MarySue Schultz, Carl Bullock, Joe Wakefield, Ed Szoke,
           Jim Ramer, Tom LeFebvre, Rich Jesuroga, and Susan Williams

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) is a Java based software framework for
analyzing and visualizing geosciende data. The IDV is developed at the
Unidata Program Center (UPC), part of the University Corporation for
Atmospherice Research, Boulder, Colorado. The IDV brings together the
ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data,
surface observations, balloon soundings, NWS NEXRAD Level II and Level III
RADAR data, and NOAA National Profiler Network data, all within a unified
interface. The IDV can display any Earth-located data if it is provided
in a known format.

For more information, refer to the following URL:

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/IDV/index.html

IDV
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Woody started the meeting by describint the appearance of the IDV.

  - servers around the country save different types of data and can
    be displayed
  - THREADS based catalog information passing. The client does not have
    prior knowledge of what is available from any particular database. That
    information is provided "on the fly" from the server which includes
    field names, and valid times. There is no auto-update feature, but you
    can manually "update" the catalog information.
  - IDV is Java-based using OpenGL, the VisAD library, and other Java-based
    utility packages
  - data from different servers can be over laid
  - supports multipledisplay windows
  - users of the IDV can add data sources
  - data displays data in 3D giving the user the ability to tilt/rotate along
    with pan and zoom. Zoom uses pixel-replication except for metars, etc.
    which has a progressive disclosure feature.
  - data are not tied to scale. Initial scale and projection display 
    information are included in the data.
  - Radar data are displayed in a manner similar to the D2D Home tool.
    Level II rada data can be displayed in earth coordinates.
  - Types of data available: metars, radar, gridded model fields, satellite,
    raob, profiler 
  - Data probe concept similar to the D2D sampling of data in 2D or 3D
  - interactive legends are similar to D2D but are in a separate scrollable
    panel at the bottom of the window.
  - Includes a primitive drawing tool
  - Capable of adding text to displays
  - Capable of capturing jpeg images of the display
  - Capable of creating formulas (is this similar to the product maker
    and smart tools.

Discussion Items
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  - What does the lack of tieing data to scale buy us? Would the file
    size of the data to be displayed be very large? On AWIPS data are
    clipped and stored to make data access faster.

  - How can we apply the IDV research/code to our next generation
    system? The IDV source code and openGL is freely available, so we can
    take a look and see what would be useful.

  - What is the time matching paradyme used? Can you change the primary
    time coordinate to which you want to match the other loaded data to?

  - Can we get the performance we need from using the IDV concept? IDV image
    loads took several seconds per image to display, but this included
    downloading the data from a remote host. We need to compare with a
    local data source (the AWIPS database?) to see how performance changes.

  - Are there hardware consideration we need to look at regarding the
    the type of video cards being utilized? We could run the IDV on the
    D2D screens using the single-screen InVidea card, but it would not run
    using the dual-screen Matrox card.

  - 2D vs 3D processing? IDV processes all in a 3D mode. Is this overkill
    for our 2D needs? There may be some simpler (faster?) OpenGL 2D code
    available.

  - How are the data catalogs created? From the cdl?