Abstract
Autoplot is software developed for the Virtual Observatories in Heliophysics to provide intelligent and automated plotting capabilities for many typical data products that are stored in a variety of file formats or databases. Autoplot has proven to be a flexible tool for exploring, accessing, and viewing data resources as typically found on the web, usually in the form of a directory containing data files with multiple parameters contained in each file. Data from a data source is abstracted into a common internal data model called QDataSet. Autoplot is built from individually useful components, and can be extended and reused to create specialized data handling and analysis applications and is being used in a variety of science visualization and analysis applications. Although originally developed for viewing heliophysics-related time series and spectrograms, its flexible and generic data representation model makes it potentially useful for the Earth sciences.
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Acknowledgements
Autoplot development was supported by NASA grant NNX07AB70G (VxO for S3C Data: The Virtual Radiation Belt Observatory), and NASA Grant No. NNX07AC95G (Virtual Magnetospheric Observatory) issued through the Virtual Observatories for Solar and Space Physics Data (S3CVO). Additional support for development has been provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Radiation Belt Storm Probes project. We also acknowledge Edward Jackson, Edward West, and Larry Granroth for creative contributions and consulting, and the Plasma Wave Group at the University of Iowa for development support and the use of its open-source Das2 library, and the many early adopters who provided feedback.
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Communicated by Thomas Narock
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Faden, J.B., Weigel, R.S., Merka, J. et al. Autoplot: a browser for scientific data on the web. Earth Sci Inform 3, 41–49 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-010-0049-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-010-0049-0