GeoVISTA Studio:: a codeless visual programming environment for geoscientific data analysis and visualization

The fundamental goal of the GeoVISTA Studio project is to improve geoscientific analysis by providing an environment that operationally integrates a wide range of analysis activities, including those both computationally and visually based. Improving the infrastructure used in analysis has far-reaching potential to better integrate human-based and computationally based expertise, and so ultimately improve scientific outcomes. To address these challenges, some difficult system design and software engineering problems must be overcome. This paper illustrates the design of a component-oriented system, GeoVISTA Studio, as a means to overcome such difficulties by using state-of-the-art component-based software engineering techniques. Advantages described include: ease of program construction (visual programming), an open (non-proprietary) architecture, simple component-based integration and advanced deployment methods. This versatility has the potential to change the nature of systems development for the geosciences, providing better mechanisms to coordinate complex functionality, and as a consequence, to improve analysis by closer integration of software tools and better engagement of the human expert. Two example applications are presented to illustrate the potential of the Studio environment for exploring and better understanding large, complex geographical datasets and for supporting complex visual and computational analysis. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.