TOF-VIS, Software for Interactive Exploration of Time-of-Flight Data
T. Worlton 1 and D. Mikkelson 2
1 IPNS, Argonne National Laboratory, 2 University of Wisconsin-Stout
Users visiting a neutron or X Ray source may have little experience with local data collection and analysis methods, so there is a need for intuitive software to display, manipulate, and analyze data. Such software needs to be portable as well as easy to use. With the advent of NeXUS, there is an opportunity to develop a common software package that could be used up to the specific data analysis. TOF-VIS, which uses a familiar user interface, common programming tools, and is portable between OpenVMS and UNIX, would be a good starting point for such a program. In TOF_VIS, all spectra from an experiment are displayed simultaneously as an image, and the cursor can be used to select slices through the data for X-Y plots. The data can be displayed in terms of time-of-flight, energy, wave-vector, or lattice spacing, and hardcopy plots of the image or the X-Y plots can be produced. TOF-VIS has been used for examining data from IPNS and ISIS, and has been useful for diagnosing problems with instruments and detectors as well as for making a quick evaluation of the quality of the data. We plan to extend TOF_VIS to allow input and output of NeXUS files and to include data manipulation features. A proposed user interface, extended to include these features, will be described along with the existing TOF_VIS program.
(posted 28-Oct-97 jw)