2. Getting Started
When the application is started, a main menu opens. There the user can select which of the modules described below should be used.
In the editor module, the user can create new toolchains or revise existing toolchains by arranging VA tools and data sources in a directed graph. The visual user interface of the editor consists of three storage areas.
- The Toolpool contains sources that are assumed to be visual analysis tools. These include locally executable programs, links to program origins as well as addresses to web services. Each VA tool is assigned a unique identifier during import.
- The Datapool contains sources that are considered as data origin. This can include, for example, one-dimensional sensor data, two-dimensional image data, but also manual information such as patient files. The data type does not matter when importing into the data pool.
- The Graphpool contains references to the imported VA tools and data sources in order to link them in a meaningful way. Each step for processing the toolchain can be represented by a collection of VA tools and data sources.
To provide a natural user experience, Anyproc is largely based on drag-and-drop interaction. Thus, both VA tools and data sources are simply dragged into the appropriate containers for import. These containers represent the resources available to create the coordination graph in the center of the editor interface. To create a toolchain, content from the toolpool or data pool can be dragged and dropped into the graphpool. This creates new timeslots or expands existings onces. Each timeslot can thereby contain a set of VA tools and data sources to represent the current work step in the toolchain. After the coordination graph is created and specified by the user, they can move on to the next slot.
In the executor module, the user can run through the created toolchain to examine the imported data with the imported VA tools in the corresponding timesteps by using the arrows (left and right in the image). The user can thereby explore either forward or backward along the timeline. When pressing the respective button, the tools with the connected data sources from each timeslot will be opened automatically and data will be exchanged as defined in the connection settings (see Section Connection Options).
The settings module should make it possible to set parameters across applications. Currently, this option is only used for testing purposes. However, we hope that in the future we will be able to use it to define uniform specifications for visualization parameters such as scales or color tones.