CyberSKA Portal Release Notes – v1.5.0 – Dec. 19, 2012

The new release of the CyberSKA portal is now in production. This release includes an updated version of the Elgg platform, improved file upload and many improvements to the server side visualization system.

The Elgg version used by the portal has been upgraded to version 1.7.15 that provides stability and security fixes. Work has been done on the file upload tools to allow larger files to be uploaded and ingested into the data management system. Also, users now have the ability to designate that a file they have uploaded to the portal can be viewed, but not downloaded. The email tools used have been improved to provide better formatting of messages. It should be noted that the client side viewer has been removed from this version as improvements to the server side visualization system have eliminated the need for it.

Updates to the server side visualization tool have again improved performance and added functionality. Performance optimizations include the addition of automatic cache generation that speed up a number of operations including z-profile viewing. Functionality improvements include adding the ability to load a polarization data set that consists of stokes I, Q and U cubes. Also additional dialogs have been added to provide more information when viewing polorization data sets. A new tool has been added that calculates statistics on a region selected by the user. Also the output of many plot dialogs is now synchronized.  In addition a 2D Gaussian fitting tool has also been added and many other user interface improvements have been made.

Details of the updates in this version are given below.

Portal updates:

- Elgg has been upgraded to version 1.7.15

- deprecated client-side image viewer has been removed

- formatting of plain-text messages that are sent by the portal has been improved so that it more closely resembles the HTML-based versions displayed within the portal

- formatting of e-mail responses to portal messages no longer modified by the portal

- upload limit for regular files has been increased to 1GB from 200MB.  Information about the limit is displayed on the upload form

- user can now designate if a file can be downloaded from the portal via the Manage option.  By default, the file is considered downloadable.

Server side visualization updates:

- added ability to load a polarization data set that consist of

  stokes I, Q and U cubes

- added 5 additional plot dialogs that are available when visualizing

  polarization data sets:

    - z-profile in the Q cube

    - z-profile in the U cube

    - polarized intensity plot

    - position angle plot

    - Q/U scatter plot

- added regions statistics tool:

    - users can interactively select a rectangular section on the screen

    - the tool computes and displays various statistic about the region,

      such as min/max values, average, standard deviation, etc.

    - when visualizing cubes, the tool can also plot these values for all

      other frames

- added zooming functionality to all 2d plot dialogs

    - zooming can be done independently horizontally and vertically

    - when set to auto-zoom mode, the displayed plot is automatically scaled

      to show all values

- added various automatic synchronizations to many plot dialogs, eg:

    - all z-profile plot dialogs have their horizontal range synchronized

    - Q and U profile dialogs share the same vertical zoom

    - cursor location indicators are shared between all z-profile dialogs

- added an automatic cache generation for some information that is

  needed for visualizing large cubes

    - this has resulted in some operations being much faster, such as

      viewing z-profiles

- added some rendering options to all plot dialogs:

    - 3 diffent plot styles: join, histogram, cross

    - ability to plot a grid for the graph

    - calculate and display average/rms for the visible data

    - ability to display the average/rms as a shaded rectangle overlay

      on top of the graph

- added world coordinates to cursor display

    - users can select from J2000, B1950, ICRS, Galactic and Ecliptic systems

- added grid plotting support for the main canvas

    - the grid can be plotted in J2000, B1950, ICRS, Galactic or Ecliptic

      system

- added 2d gaussian fitting tool

- many other UI and performance improvements