LinkWinds

Allan S. (Bud) Jacobson
Andrew L. Berkin 
M/S 183-501 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory 
4800 Oak Grove Drive 
Pasadena, CA 91109 

(818) 354-0693
FAX: (818) 354-0966 
budj@apex.jpl.nasa.gov 

The Linked Windows Interactive Data System (LinkWinds) is a
visual data exploration system which has served as a testbed
and prototyping environment for a NASA/JPL program of
research into graphical methods for rapidly and
interactively accessing, displaying and analyzing large
multivariate multidisciplinary datasets.  It provides a
variety of functions and services, including interactive 2-
dimensional and 3-dimensional graphical displays of data,
hard copy of graphical displays and text, interactive color
manipulation, animation creation and display, data
subsetting either at the input or output, a journal and
macro capability, context-sensitive help, and network
support for data search and retrieval as well as
collaborative data analysis.  It is an integrated multi-
application execution environment, running under UNIX, with
a full graphical user interface (GUI).  While its GUI is
based upon X Windows, the SGI version of LinkWinds draws
upon the Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) IrisGL graphics library
for rendering support.  A Sun alpha-test version currently
uses X Windows exclusively, and will ultimately draw upon
the XGL library. The system has several facilities for
database access and provides for the ingestion of very large
data files in a variety of database formats.