User:Jmandel/WRF-Fire VisTrails wishlist

Jan's wishlist

Easy start

I think the following would really help to make it easier for a user to use the software.

1. up-to-date at least the first part of How to visualize WRF-Fire output in VisTrails (before the server), good even for a novice, and noting specific versions known to work
2. all up to date files (anything extra that is not in stock VisTrails distribution) identified and publicly accessible (git repository, tarballs, package files in vistrails, crowdlabs), explained in the Howto, keep track of versions

Creating visualization

• Tell SCI folks which arrays to support
• SCI will build a custom visualization too, requires close communication
• Wiki how to use kept up to date
• Long-term solution
• Howto should be for someone who has fresh installation

Fine grained workflow and NetCDF utilities

VisTrails will dump also NetCDF files. This is a natural for a VisTrails workflow. But I need standalone command line versions of the utilities also, to be included in the WRF-Fire repository, which does not depend on VisTrails. The format of the intermediate files should be NetCDF so that the files can be easily manipulated by other software we have, in particular examined in Matlab.

I'd like to have command line utilities to

1. reduce the wrfout files to NetCDF files that contain only the variables needed
2. add to the NetCDF files the node height variable computed from other fields

These can be simple Python scripts, related to VisTrails code, or we can write the code from scratch in Fortran or Matlab if needed.

The follow-up tasks are then

1. convert the resulting NetCDF files to VisTrails format and visualize in VisTrails
2. convert the resulting NetCDF files to VAPOR .vdf files and visualize the .vdf files in VAPOR

Other

• User interface suggestions
• Difficulty finding the right files

Jon's ideas

A couple of ideas that could help with usability and development.

Configuration parameters

Trying to customize a simulation by setting defaults for input ports is awkward and becomes almost impossible to manage when there is a large number of options in a workflow. I'm wondering if it would be possible to make some sort of a default configuration dialog that would pop up when running a workflow. Something like a standard configuration widget that contains all unconnected input ports that you can see and modify in one place.

Even better would be something like a module that you can place in the workflow with one output port. When you connect the output port to an input with a basic class (float/int/file/bool, etc.) that input is added to the configuration dialog with an appropriate gui element (for files, a string input with a button for opening a file dialog, etc.). Maybe multiple configuration boxes in the workflow could create individual tabs in the dialog.

Subworkflows

The problem with the workflow containing too many boxes is it becomes overcomplicated both to understand what it is really doing and to find what it is you are looking for. I'm aware that there is support for grouping of boxes and subworkflows; however, the problem with this approach is that all of the input/output ports get combined into a single box and (as far as I can tell) there is no way to figure out what each port does. Perhaps a way to annotate ports would help.