Welcome to OpenDX, a general purpose scientific and data visualization program. OpenDX appeared in May 1999 when IBM converted its commercial product, IBM Visualization Data Explorer (known as "DX" for short), into open source software. For the past decade, scientists, engineers, researchers, and data analysts in business, government, and academia have used DX to generate amazing images, animations, presentations, and, most importantly, to gain better understanding of complex data.

The commercial version of DX was the result of ten years of dedicated work by a group of talented programmers, developers, and researchers at the T.J. Watson Research Center in New York State. The Cornell Theory Center was one of the very first alpha test sites for DX, commencing in April 1991, and this author was one of those original testers.

OpenDX (http://www.opendx.org) is the work of a number of hard-working people, some within IBM, several outside, over the past year. Many new features that were already under development were rolled into the open source release. Also, since the release of the source code, OpenDX has been ported to various Linux and FreeBSD platforms, in addition to being compiled for several commercial Unix systems that DX has always run on, such as SGI, HP, Sun, and AIX.

The commercial DX also ran on Windows/Intel platforms though it required the installation of X-server software (i.e., it was not a true Windows port). OpenDX is being made to run similarly, but the work is not yet complete in making this fully robust (as of this writing in April 2000). You can still acquire a copy of the last commercial release for Windows platforms. That version is sufficient for this workshop, but it does not have all the new features of OpenDX so some sections in this workshop will not apply to you, or must be done slightly differently to achieve the same goals.

OpenDX is a work in progress. All users have the responsibility and the opportunity to make it better over time through their contributions. To monitor the progress of development, contribute your opinions, report bugs or feature requests, or volunteer assistance, tips, tricks, corrections, etc., visit the opendx.org web site and subscribe to the mail-lists. If you have an answer for someone else's posted question, please help them out! If you get stuck, check the FAQs and other support materials at opendx.org. If you make a discovery, contribute it to the FAQ.

If you are used to commercial software, you expect to pay for it and you expect the company selling it to fix things that don't work and to make an attempt to document how the program does work. OpenDX is not IBM's product. You don't send them any money, and you can't expect them to fix, improve, and document this product. In fact, they still do have a few people working to fix and improve OpenDX as part of the open source effort, but then there are a number of non-IBMers working just as hard. And you are welcome to become one of these! Lend your talents!

I want to emphasize this so I don't have to keep apologizing for things that are confusing due to the current state of OpenDX and the still available, but now somewhat dated, commercial version of DX. Please keep in mind that things are changing as I write this. Just a short time ago, the "blessed" OpenDX 4.1 version was made available. This represents about the tenth iteration since May of 1999. Not bad considering the work is being done by volunteers. There simply aren't enough people tackling all the work that remains to be done. One of the unfortunate laggards is the documentation. I hope that I can help steer you through the shoals but we will hit some rocky bits.