A Concept for Time-Dependent Processes

We develop a new concept to extend a static interactive visualization package to a time-dependent animation environment by reusing as many as possible of the existing static classes and methods. The discussion is based on an object-oriented mathematical programming environment and is applied to parameter-dependent structures, time-dependent adaptive geometries and ow computations but most of the ideas apply to other environments in scienti c visualization too. We de ne new classes describing dynamic processes (including e.g. time-dependent adaptive geometries) and specify a protocol mechanism they must understand. This allows the de nition of a class TimeNode supervising an arbitrary dynamic processes as a time-dependent node in a formerly static data hierarchy. We discuss mechanisms of such time-dependent hierarchies, and additionally the problem of algorithms on time-dependent geometries in a number of