The prototype of our system is being developed on SGI workstations, but the target platform is not yet decided. This imposes demand of high portability of our application software. Since the main portability problems can be expected with graphics and user interface, we use standard environments for such development supported on many platforms. High level graphics operations and relevant user interface is based on Open Inventor, while low level graphics refer to OpenGL. In the near future, add-on graphics boards supporting these standards for PC class computers are expected on the market, and then our software can be run on inexpensive hardware configuration.
The generated report of the IDCS system is accessible on nearly any platform without having our specialized system because we use the emerging HTML and VRML standards. Those file formats can be processed by various viewers (e.g., Mosaic, Netscape, WebSpace, Webview, VRweb). These standards enable data exchange and preserve the context between the different (text, 2-D, 3-D) data. Another advantage is the homogeneous user interface to the data which is not specialized for our application.