3.6 Visualization

There are several possible ways to visualize the data stored on a persistent Wafer. The most intuitive way -- to use a tool that is able to directly read a Wafer file -- is yet to be implemented. A reasonable way to implement such a tool is certainly to adopt a common wide spread file format for which powerful visualization programs already exist. By supporting the HDF file format the WAFER-STATE-SERVER is equipped with the basic prerequisite for powerful visualization programs. HDF is widely used and generally adopted for scientific applications. Unfortunately, a powerful visualization tool is not yet available.

Another potential candidate for a direct visualization is the WSS file format. Since it is also available in the JAVA programming language, visualization libraries like VTK [52], for which a JAVA binding is available, or VISAD [53] which uses the JAVA3D standard could be used. One must keep in mind, however, that the memory overhead for programs written in the JAVA programming language, particularly those with graphical output is tremendous.

The implemented way for Wafer visualization is the usage of the visualization library VTK [52] via the TCL [54] language binding and the VTK native file format. This is supported by a conversion program that converts Wafers stored in the WSS file format into the VTK format. The implemented visualization is presently limited to viewing only one attribute per file.

2003-03-27