VIZSCHEMA – VISUALIZATION INTERFACE FOR SCIENTIFIC DATA

Different scientific applications use many different formats to store their data. Even if common, self-described data formats, such as HDF5 or NetCDF, are used, data organization (e.g. the structure and names of groups, datasets and attributes) differs between applications and experiments. This makes development of uniform visualization tools problematic and data comparison difficult. VizSchema is an effort to standardize metadata of common self-described data formats so that the entities needed to visualize the data can be identified and interpreted by visualization tools. These standards are expressed both as human-readable text, programmatically, and as an XML description. An HDF5 data reader and a plugin for the visualization tool VisIt implementing this standard has been developed. This plugin allows visualization of data from multiple applications that use notions of fields, particles, and geometries. The data that has been visualized comes from multiple domains: fusion and plasma physics simulations, accelerator physics, climate modeling, and nanotechnology.