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Carliles, S., Ho, T. K., & O'Mullane, W. 2003, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 314 Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIII, eds. F. Ochsenbein, M. Allen, & D. Egret (San Francisco: ASP), 300

VO Enabled Mirage and the IVOA Client Package

Samuel Carliles1, Tin Kam Ho2, William O'Mullane3

Abstract:

Astronomers commonly analyze astronomical data by imposing different views on the data, frequently viewing it in image form or as multi-dimensional plots. The ability to correlate the data in these views in order to see manifestations of patterns across views would be a powerful tool. The Mirage data visualization application offers this functionality. In order to increase the value of this tool to astronomers, we have added two features to Mirage, namely a module for viewing FITS images, and the ability to load VOTable data. During the process of adding the VOTable functionality to Mirage, we also developed a separate Java package, called the IVOA Client Package, which can be integrated easily into any other Java application to provide the ability to load VOTable data via Cone search queries submitted to any Cone services published in a Registry, or by a direct SDSS CAS query. We describe briefly the IVOA Client Package, the usage of VO Enabled Mirage, and the process of writing a data view module which can be incorporated into Mirage. We also briefly describe the process of programming a FITS viewer in Java using JSky.

1. Introduction

We describe the IVOA Client Package, a Java package which offers high-level VO functionality to any Java application. We then describe VO Enabled Mirage, an extended version of Mirage (Ho 2003), which offers easy retrieval and analysis of VOTable data, and correlation with FITS image data. We also describe the process of integrating a new data view module with Mirage, using the example of the TwoDPictorialDisplayMode module, which allows viewing of FITS images, and which includes some common astronomical image manipulation functionality, using components from JSky for some operations.

2. The IVOA Client Package

The IVOA Client Package, used by VO Enabled Mirage, can be integrated easily into any Java application, enabling retrieval of VO data. VOTable parsing is based on SAVOT or optionally on JAVOT. The IVOA Client Package is composed of three main components: a search panel which provides a user interface to VO Cone/SIAP and SDSS CAS searches, a common interface, called ivoa.VOTWrap, for accessing VOTable data from SAVOT and JAVOT interchangeably without requiring different application code, and a Task Manager which gives user control over indeterminate-length operations.

The VOTWrap implementation supports access to table data in VOTables. Support for other features of VOTables may be implemented as needed. The motivation behind interchanging SAVOT and JAVOT is that they behave slightly differently, and the optimal choice depends on the situation. SAVOT is a very tolerant parser which will frequently parse non-compliant VOTables, but it doesn't propagate exceptions up to application code, so graceful exception-handling with SAVOT is not possible. JAVOT does propagate exceptions to the calling application, but it is very strict about standards compliance. In particular, we discovered that JAVOT will not parse VOTable data if the VOTable refers to its Schema definition and for some reason the definition is inaccessible (for instance, due to server outage.) There does not appear to be any way to relax this behavior.

The Task Manager has been designed to handle any kind of task that can be programmed, with the currently implemented tasks tending to be of the data-retrieval variety. The ivoa.Task class can be extended easily to provide whatever functionality is necessary.

3. VO Enabled Mirage

VO Enabled Mirage has all the features of ``classic'' Mirage including multiple data views and clustering algorithms, with the additional feature of being able to load VOTable data and perform VO Cone/SIAP and SDSS CAS searches. It also includes an astronomical imaging module which loads FITS images using JSky classes, and allows image manipulation operations common in many astronomical imaging applications.

3.1 Using VO Enabled Mirage

Data files, including VOTable files, may be loaded into VO Enabled Mirage from the Console $\rightarrow$ New Dataset menu item just as in classic Mirage. VOTables may also be loaded directly from Cone and SDSS CAS searches using the Console $\rightarrow$ New Dataset from VO Source menu item. Once a dataset is loaded, the astronomical imaging module can be opened by dragging the M51 icon ( \scalebox {0.5}{\includegraphics{P3-12_f1.eps}}) into any data view panel as in classic Mirage.

3.2 Adding VOTable Functionality

Mirage is implemented as a command interpreter with a programmatic interface which can be called by user interface code. The user interface to classic Mirage instantiates a different Mirage interpreter for each dataset. VO functionality was added to Mirage by extending the original user interface. Data loading commands generated by the user interface are intercepted and converted from VOTable to Mirage's native data format if necessary. Then adding a menu option to invoke the IVOA Client search panel was possible using the normal Java Swing API. The code for converting VOTable data to Mirage native data was written using the VOTWrap SAVOT/JAVOT wrapper interface from the IVOA Client Package which allows generic access to field information, some of which must go at the beginning of Mirage's file format. Then data is written out one record per line with space-delimited fields.

3.3 Adding a Data View Module

3.3.1 The ActivePanel Interface

3.3.1.1

The mirage.MirageGraphics.ActivePanel interface can be implemented by any module that one wishes to integrate with Mirage. This interface is still under development, and the semantic intepretation of these methods is still not clearly defined. The interpretation used to implement the TwoDPictorialDisplayMode module is offered here. Implementing classes must provide concrete implementations of the methods listed below. The mirage.MirageData.Entry class encapsulates a row of data, and is used in many of these methods. Each Entry also has a Color associated with it, which may be assigned by the user.

public Vector getSelected(): This should return a Vector containing instances of Entry representing the rows currently selected.
public void clearSelected(): This tells the module to deselect any currently selected Entrys.
public void transferDropTarget(DropTarget dropTarget): This
should invoke setDropTarget(dropTarget) on any Components in the module so that the module can be overwritten by another module selected by the user.
public void colorDataEntry(Vector entry): This tells the module to color the display of Entrys in entry as appropriate for the view.
public void highlightDataEntry(Vector entry): This tells the module to highlight the Entrys in entry as appropriate for the view.
public void clearColors(): This tells the module to show all Entrys in the default Color for multi-color display.
public void clearHighlights(): This tells the module to show all Entrys in the default Color for monochrome display.
public void changeToMonochrome(): This tells the module to show selected Entrys in the monochrome highlighted Color.
public void changeToColor(): This tells the module to show selected Entrys using their associated Colors.
public void alternateVariables(int mode, int row, int col,
int idxCell, int nCells):
This method informs the module of its position within a matrix of similar modules. The module can alter its appearance accordingly (e.g. select a different variable for display). For image data the display dimensions are fixed, so in TwoDPictorialDisplayMode it is implemented as a no-op.

To load a new module into Mirage, add a line reading

externalpanel classname iconimage
to the Property.dat file that comes with Mirage, where classname is the fully qualified name of the class for the module to be loaded, and iconimage is a path sufficiently specific that the icon image file can be loaded as a resource at runtime by the Java Virtual Machine.

3.3.2 The TwoDPictorialDisplayMode Data View Module

3.3.2.1

The TwoDPictorialDisplayMode in VO Enabled Mirage allows the user to load FITS images, apply user-selected cut levels, apply colormaps, and adjust brightness and contrast with SAO DS9-style controls. Also, being a Mirage ActivePanel class, it responds to Mirage broadcast messages, and can itself broadcast messages to other Mirage modules. Much of the implementation uses classes and code from JSky, which provides an easy way to load FITS images and use them within the Java Advanced Imaging API (JAI) framework, as well as many image processing operations and support for WCS to image (and reverse) coordinate transforms. Some problems were encountered using JSky. Mapping from an arbitrary FITS image data type to a type associated with Java RenderedImages is not entirely predictable. The implementation of certain image processing functions had to be copied verbatim due to a very tight coupling between the model classes and the view/controller classes.

The TwoDPictorialDisplayMode image processing classes are implemented as a class hierarchy with each extension adding processing functionality to its superclass. The intention was to encapsulate the image processing functionality in the image itself to make it easy to integrate into any Java graphical component. However, this design resulted in slow performance as well as difficult maintenance and extensibility. We are currently redesigning it with the goal of improving each of these aspects.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Allan Brighton for his advice on using JSky in the implementation of the TwoDPictorialDisplayMode module.

References

Ho, T.K. 2003, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 295, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XII, ed. H. E. Payne, R. I. Jedrzejewski, & R. N. Hook (San Francisco: ASP), 339



Footnotes

... Carliles1
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
... Ho2
Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, New Jersey
... O'Mullane3
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

© Copyright 2004 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, California 94112, USA
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