ViSlang: A system for interpreted domain-specific languages for scientific visualization
Type
ArticleKAUST Department
Visual Computing Center (VCC)Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
Computer Science Program
Date
2014-12-31Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/575629
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Researchers from many domains use scientific visualization in their daily practice. Existing implementations of algorithms usually come with a graphical user interface (high-level interface), or as software library or source code (low-level interface). In this paper we present a system that integrates domain-specific languages (DSLs) and facilitates the creation of new DSLs. DSLs provide an effective interface for domain scientists avoiding the difficulties involved with low-level interfaces and at the same time offering more flexibility than high-level interfaces. We describe the design and implementation of ViSlang, an interpreted language specifically tailored for scientific visualization. A major contribution of our design is the extensibility of the ViSlang language. Novel DSLs that are tailored to the problems of the domain can be created and integrated into ViSlang. We show that our approach can be added to existing user interfaces to increase the flexibility for expert users on demand, but at the same time does not interfere with the user experience of novice users. To demonstrate the flexibility of our approach we present new DSLs for volume processing, querying and visualization. We report the implementation effort for new DSLs and compare our approach with Matlab and Python implementations in terms of run-time performance.Citation
Rautek, P., Bruckner, S., Groller, M. E., & Hadwiger, M. (2014). ViSlang: A System for Interpreted Domain-Specific Languages for Scientific Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 20(12), 2388–2396. doi:10.1109/tvcg.2014.2346318Sponsors
The research presented in this publication was supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Visual Computing Center, and the ViMaL project (FWF - Austrian Science Fund, no. P21695).ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346318