DSVOL  Implementation of a Distributed Architecture Combining General-purpose Visualization and Sonification

Veridiana Christie Lucas Salvador(1), Rosane Minghim (1), and Haim Levkowitz(2)
(1) Instituto de Cincias Matemticas e de Computao
University of So Paulo, So Carlos  SP, Brazil
(2) Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA.

ABSTRACT
In Scientific Visualization, distributed architectures and the World-Wide-Web allow remote access to
expensive resources, and the cooperation amongst teams of experts that are located in different places,
empowering its applications. The use of sound as a data display tool (sonification) has been shown to
support information understanding and may help dealing with adding dimensions to a visual display.
Thus far those issues have been treated separately, although sonification may have implications on
how a system is built. This paper presents an architecture and a corresponding prototype
implementation of a distributed system for visualization that incorporates some of these resources and
technologies, such as visualization on the web, distributed visualization, and sonification. The paper
also presents the evolution of the distribution approach, which, in an earlier implementation,
employed CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and in the current implementation
uses the XML-based protocol SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) as a tool for distribution on the
computer network. A discussion on the use of both distribution tools in visualization tasks is given.

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