This book contains instructions for installing the Advanced Khoros software package on UNIX-based workstations and computer systems with X Window System-based graphics display systems. The text covers installation of Advanced Khoros from the Khoral Research, Inc. ftp site. We have tried to anticipate all your questions, whether you are installing Advanced Khoros for the first time or are upgrading from a previous version. However, this guide is meant for readers who are already quite familiar with computers in general and UNIX systems in particular.
Khoros provides both an application environment and a software development environment for multidimensional data processing, analysis, exploration, and visualization. The Advanced Khoros environments have been carefully designed to enable and encourage efficient collaboration among scientists, engineers, data analysts, researchers, system integrators, and software developers. Advanced Khoros has achieved this by creating a robust infrastructure emphasizing ease-of-use, portability, scalability, and extensibility. For example, all Advanced Khoros applications, including those developed by you with the Khoros software development tools, can transparently access arbitrarily large data sets of many data types, distributed across a network, independent of the data transport mechanism.
The Advanced Khoros application environment provides a rich set of programs for information processing, data exploration, and data visualization. With Advanced Khoros generalized data operators, you can solve problems in fields as diverse as medical imaging, remote sensing, signal processing, numerical analysis, and process control.
Advanced Khoros data analysis tools provide multidimensional, data manipulation operators including pointwise arithmetic, statistics calculations, data conversions, histograms, data organization, and size operators. Advanced Khoros contains extensive image processing routines and matrix manipulation capabilities, as well. Advanced Khoros interactive data visualization programs include an image display & manipulation package, an animation program, a 2D/3D plotting package, a colormap editing tool, and an interactive image/signal classification application. In addition, a number of data processing routines are provided, along with a software rendering application.
All information processing and visualization programs in Advanced Khoros are available via the visual programming language, Cantata. Cantata is a graphically expressed, data-flow visual language which provides a visual programming environment within the Advanced Khoros system. By providing a natural environment familiar to practitioners in the field, the visual language provides support to both novice and experienced programmers. Cantata supports coarse grain distributed processes; it can handle both stream and block data. Its visual hierarchy, iteration, flow control, and expression-based parameters make it a powerful simulation and prototyping system.
Advanced Khoros is a software integration and development environment that emphasizes information processing and data exploration. Advanced Khoros provides a complete application development environment that redefines the software engineering process to include all members of the project group, from the application end-user to the infrastructure programmer.
Advanced Khoros provides a powerful working environment for the engineering and scientific communities, addressing many of the issues associated with quickly developing X Window System-based applications, prototyping solutions to complex problems, and utilizing the resources of a distributed network. The layered approach of the Advanced Khoros infrastructure and the concept of program services, provide developers with the flexibility to create complex applications, while at the same time hiding the intimidating details of UNIX operating systems and the X Window System.
For application developers, the Advanced Khoros Toolbox Programmer's system consists of programming services and software development tools that support all aspects of developing new engineering and scientific applications. Applications written to Advanced Khoros can take advantage of the same capabilities offered by the Advanced Khoros data processing and visualization routines, including the ability to transparently access large data sets distributed across a network, operate on a variety of data and file formats without conversion, and maintain a consistent presentation with a standardized user interface.
The software development environment provides developers with a direct manipulation graphical user interface design tool, automatic code generation, standardized user interface and documentation, and interactive configuration management. The Advanced Khoros software development system can also be used for software integration, where existing programs can be brought together into a consistent, standardized, and cohesive environment.