WebWinds Recognized! The WebWinds client and server package (DOVE) was selected for honorable mention in NASA's Software of the Year competition for 2001.

WebWinds is an interactive science data visualization system, written in Java and available for all major computer platforms. Its use does not require any user programming experience since sessions are created by assembling components on the screen via 'point and click'. WebWinds is modular, allowing flexibility in tool construction and application. This version allows internet-based distributed processing for the first time so that it can fulfill the needs of data providers as well as data consumers.

The WebWinds user interface uses a direct manipulation approach in that it employs continuous representation of displays and controls requiring physical actions rather than complex syntax. The benefits of this approach are that it allows rapid response to operations with immediately visible effects.

Webwinds now does distributed processing allowing direct data access via a data server.

Currently, the main features of WebWinds are:

• The ability to present and manipulate 2 and 3 dimensional data in a variety of 1 and 2 dimensional display tools
• The ability to subset and sub-sample data on input or display output, making it possible to handle very large data sets.
• The ability to concatenate or combine data sets to create a higher order data set.
• The ability to overlay tabular data on top of images.
• The ability to display several types of coordinate projections for some types of data.
• Simultaneous display and analysis of multiple data sets which may be totally unrelated.
• Interactive color manipulation.
• The ability to act as a Web browser helper application, making it possible to survey scientific data archives in interactive mode.
• Ability to save sub-setted or sub-sampled data.
• A scripting language which allows session configuration, re-run, macros, network collaboration and distributed processing.
• A context sensitive help system.
• The ability to save images from the screen to a file, including animated movies.
• Complete, free installation programs (including Java) for most platforms.
• A server software package which allows remote data access, sub-setting and sub-sampling.
• 3D rendered displays capable of depicting an image in perspective using lighting and shading: