Eirik: a prototype data navigation tool

Introduction

Eirik is a prototype tool for data navigation, which grew from the compilation of a report on dimension reduction techniques created for the VOTech DS6 project, which is currently available online, but which will be included in the final submission of the VOTech submission to PPARC (as I understand it).

Documentation

A number of presentations describing this work are available on the VOTech wiki, notably: the DS6SoftwareSurvey, in the Stage 2 report and Stage 3 report. Also, an introductory wiki page also exists at EirikDemo, which gives a brief description of usage and also hosts binary executables and source for linux and win32 platforms. Much fuller user documentation is now included with these binary/source files and can also be obtained here.

It is expected, however, that the the most current Eirik sources will be on the newly proposed VOForge site (when this get up and running) and, in future, from my own repository at SourceForge (nothing released there as yet though!). For completeness, the user guide and api docs are also available as bundled zip files at the links below.

• api_html.tar.gz: api documentation generated by doxygen

• userguide.tar.gz: user guide docs

Executables

I've built XP and linux (FC5) binaries, which are statically linked against Qt and various other libraries, so that the only pre-requisites are having an R and java installation. The binaries are:

• eirik-linux.tar.bz2: Linux binary of eirik (see INSTALL.LINUX; run by ./eirik.sh)

• eirik-win32.tar.bz2: windows binary bzip (Use 7-zip to extract; eirik_run.bat to execute)

and a complete cvs source tree lies at:

• eirik.tar.bz2: source tar file only

Data

Here are some test data to play with -- these data are not meant to be all-comprehensive, but some interesting trends are visible!

• sdss

This is a fairly modest chunk of the SDSS data donated to Xmdv web-site (which cannot practically be viewed in xmdv).

• iris

The famous Iris data set (borrowed from R). This shows how the correlations can be picked up in Eirik.

• xmm-crab

Some (fairly random) x-ray data of a certain object. This has a lot of null data in one column, which has (an unfair) influence on any further analysis.

-- RichardHolbrey - 18 Dec 2006

ps ...thanks

Many thanks to all those who helped me assemble this project, through various teething troubles: not least Bob, Ken, John, Dave, Noel, Mark, Keith and Garry but many others too. Maybe our paths will cross again some day...