RVS FAQ

1. What is RVS

The Remote Visualisation System is a distributed software system that allows the visualisation and analysis of remotely located astronomical images. Users connected to the internet may view and analyse images stored anywhere on the internet, including remote data archives that have a web interface.

2. Where was the RVS developed?

The RVS was developed at the Australia Telescope National Facility (a division of CSIRO).

3. How is the RVS different from other remote visualisation products?

The RVS is a server-side system. The RVS server provides its visualisation service over the internet, via a web service. Client applications connect to the service, make processing requests and receive the result of those requests to present to the user.

The idea is to avoid large data transfers between the client and the server. By deploying the server where the data is, clients on low bandwidth connections can visualise large datasets more quickly than if they were to download the datasets from the archive.

. How do I use the RVS?

. Can I download and install the RVS Web Service?

. Why does the RVS use a client-server model?

One of the advantages of having a client-server model, as mentioned above, is that large images can be visualised by clients with low bandwidth connections. A client-server model also results in the possibility of a variety of different client types. These may range from web browsers to fully blown applications written in any language on any platform. The RVS Viewer is a java based application that uses the RVS web service for image processing. For example, We have succesfully visualised on 300MB cubes on a PDA using a simple java application.

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