Claudio Gheller

Visualization, exploration, and data analysis of complex astrophysical data

In this paper, we show how advanced visualization tools can help the researcher in investigating and extracting information from data. The focus is on VisIVO, a novel open-source graphics application that blends high-performance multidimensional visualization techniques and up-to-date technologies to cooperate with other applications and to access remote, distributed data archives. VisIVO supports the standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance in order to make it interoperable with VO data repositories. The paper describes the basic technical details and features of the software, and it dedicates a large section to show how VisIVO can be used in several scientific cases.

The TVO Archive for Cosmological Simulations: Web Services and Architecture

In order to offer an intuitive but effective access to a growing number of cosmological simulations, we have developed the Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory project (ITVO), as described by Pasian and colleagues in 2006. In this work we describe two Web portals as two ways to access and share complex data coming from numerical astrophysical simulations. We present a set of Web services aimed at offering services such as Simple Numeric Access (ProtocolSNAPSimple Numeric Access Protocol), as described by Gheller and colleagues in 2006, and Randomizers dealing with different data formats. The Web services technology allows us to run a particular task (a SNAP job, for instance) close to its data, avoiding an expensive data transfer.

VisIVO: an interoperable visualisation tool for Virtual Observatory data

We present VisIVO a software for the visualisation and analysis of astrophysical data which can be retrieved from the Virtual Observatory framework and for cosmological simulations. VisIVO is VO standards compliant and supports the most important astronomical data formats such as FITS, HDF5 and VOTables. Data can be retrieved directly connecting to an available VO service (i.e., VizieR WS), loaded in the local computer memory where they can be further selected, visualised and manipulated.

A multi dimensional visualization and analysis toolkit for astrophysics

The AstroMD toolkit is a visualization and analysis software, specifically oriented to astrophysical data representation. It is included in the project Cosmo.Lab, financed by the European Community, which involves several European astrophysical institutions and CINECA. This tool gives a 3D graphic representation of the data exploiting all the available information and making use of the immersive visualization techniques. AstroMD uses the most advanced visualization technology, based on virtual reality, in order to build a leading edge instrument both for scientific research and for cultural dissemination and education. It is developed using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) by Kitware (http://www.kitware.com), a freely available visualization library portable on several platforms. AstroMD is an open source completely free code which is freely available (http://cosmolab.cineca.it).