T353 Curating Physical Samples in a Digital World (Posters)

Wednesday, 25 October 2017
9:00 AM - 6:30 PM
Halls 4EF

TOPSOIL: COMMUNITY-DRIVEN REPLACEMENT FOR ISOPLOT DATA VISUALIZATION

Paper number: T353-3
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 9:00 AM – 6:30 PM

Authors

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, a Microsoft Excel Add-In named Isoplot has been a powerful tool for analyzing and creating visualizations of geochronological data. Developed by Dr. Kenneth Ludwig while working with the Berkeley Geochronology Center, Isoplot is available for free, and is used in more than one hundred laboratories around the world for both research and teaching. Unfortunately, Isoplot 3 is incompatible with versions of Excel released after 2003. Isoplot 4 is available exclusively for Excel versions 2007 and 2010, but only at a significant penalty to processing speed. Further, all versions of Excel must be made for Windows.

Topsoil is a desktop application and Java library that provides similar capabilities to Isoplot, developed and maintained by the Cyber Infrastructure Research and Development Lab for the Earth Sciences (CIRDLES.org), an undergraduate software engineering initiative at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Topsoil can be used on any Windows, Mac OS, or Linux system with Java installed. Topsoil is open source, and the code is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/cirdles/topsoil), so that anyone may contribute to its development.

Using Topsoil, a user is able to import data into a table or set of tables. This data is used to create plots which are freely explorable, with built-in plot features that can be toggled and adjusted. Plots may be exported in .svg format, to prevent any loss of quality due to resizing.

Over the past year, our main focus has been structuring Topsoil to provide a user-friendly experience with robust expansions of core functionality. Most of this work involves refining the way that data is stored and handled, to facilitate implementing new features . Topsoil’s user interface has also been overhauled. While Topsoil once appeared as a lonely table with few options other than “Generate Plot”, it now appears as a more conventional program, with more options for importing and exporting data and saving work flows.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 49, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2017AM-299107

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