Stylesheet transformations for interactive visualization: towards a Web3D chemistry curricula

ABSTRACT

Recent Standards specifications offer important but underemployed techniques to maximize access-to and distribution-of information for real-time 3D visualization over the web. This paper describes and evaluates such techniques to transform structured data such as Chemical Markup Language (CML) to different forms and contexts for Web3D delivery using Extensible Stylesheet Transformations (XSLT), Extensible 3D (X3D), and VRML97. Standards design approaches offer a number of advantages: data durability, data interoperability, and an ecology of tools to be deployed for production and delivery. As we demonstrate, these techniques allow developers to port data between multiple representations and formats, to leverage the separation of the presentation (reference) from the content (referent), and the ability to define 'high-level' markup tags for application-specific needs. By defining a set of XSL Transformations, we are able to generate multiple views and interaction schemes with the same data set; each one 'personalized' for different applications and different levels of expertise.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Standardization

Keywords:
education, information visualization, interactive 3D graphics, molecular chemistry