Michel Grave - Böcker

Visualization is now recognized as a powerful approach to get insight in large datasets produced by scientifc experimentations and simulations. The contributions to this book cover technical aspects as well as concrete applications of visualization in various domains such as finance, physics, astronomy and medicine, providing researchers and engineers with valuable information for setting up new powerful environments.

This book is the sixth issue in the EurographicSeminars Series. This series has been set up by Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics, in order to disseminate surveys and research results out of the field of Computer Graphics. Computer Graphics constitute a powerful and versatile tool for various application areas. The rapidly increasing use of Computer Graphics techniques and systems in many areas is caused by the availability of more powerful hardware at lower prices,' by the concise specification of Computer Graphics Interfaces in commonly·.agreed standards, and by the inven­ tion of new and often astonishing methods and algorithms for com­ position andpreserit~ti6n of pictJres and for graphical interaction. While s,o~e issues of this se.ries contain latest research results, e.g. the issues in window management systems or user interface manage­ ment systems, this book has the character of a state-of-the-art survey on important areas .of Computer Graphics. Starting from current practice and agreed consens, it will lead to the latest achievements in this field. The contributions in this issue are largely based on tutorials and seminars held at the Eurographics conferences 1984 in Copen­ hagen and 1985 in Nice.

Visualization in scientific computing is getting more and more attention from many people. Especially in relation with the fast increase of com­ puting power, graphic tools are required in many cases for interpreting and presenting the results of various simulations, or for analyzing physical phenomena. The Eurographics Working Group on Visualization in Scientific Com­ puting has therefore organized a first workshop at Electricite de France (Clamart) in cooperation with ONERA (Chatillon). A wide range of pa­ pers were selected in order to cover most of the topics of interest for the members of the group, for this first edition, and 26 of them were presented in two days. Subsequently 18 papers were selected for this volume. 1'he presentations were organized in eight small sessions, in addition to discussions in small subgroups. The first two sessions were dedicated to the specific needs for visualization in computational sciences: the need for graphics support in large computing centres and high performance net­ works, needs of research and education in universities and academic cen­ tres, and the need for effective and efficient ways of integrating numerical computations or experimental data and graphics. Three of those papers are in Part I of this book. The third session discussed the importance and difficulties of using stan­ dards in visualization software, and was related to the fourth session where some reference models and distributed graphics systems were discussed. Part II has five papers from these sessions.