I work at a national laboratory specializing in environmentally-related
research and development. For the past several years, we've been working on
a computer software system called VISTA. We are starting to use the system
for internal projects and I am trying to determine how much of a general
interest there is in the wider user community. I've included a brief abstract
of the system below.
If you or your organization could potentially use this type of system, please
send me mail.
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VISTA OVERVIEW
ABSTRACT
The Vista software system provides broad network-based access to
resources and computational programs that were not designed for modern
computing environments. Many otherwise inaccessible and separate software
programs become accessible using Vista. Its powerful framework of subsystems
automates the process for solving complex procedural problems. It can be used
in modernizing complex modeling problems in any domain--from such domains as
nuclear physics, environmental sciences, and genetics to finance and political
science.
Vista's unique, powerful process controller "wrappers" programs with the
framework, moving older applications into a new, "user friendly" open
environment with out changing the original source code of wrappered programs.
Computer programs located at distant remote sites can be wrappered and
executed. Also many end user's can use a Vista application at the same time.
Each new application of Vista is custom designed to access information and
computational power in a specific problem domain. Tools for accessing,
browsing, manipulating and managing histories of use and annotations are
included. End users have immediate and convenient access to this computing
power without devoting time to learning how to use a computer language. User
access is gained through the program's "laboratory notebooks," and data is
entered through a series of custom designed forms.
