Features

Alida provides a framework for easy development and usage of data analysis procedures.

Operators
The operator concept is the main ingredient of Alida. It defines a common interface for all operators by which their input and output parameters can be accessed,
and which also defines a standardized operator invocation procedure. Moreover, different processing steps of an analysis procedure, i.e. different operator calls,
can be linked to a directed graph structure, which allows self-documentation of the entire analysis process.
Each resulting data object in Alida, being the result of a certain operator or sequence of operations, is associated with a history graph in XML format documenting its origins and manipulative actions having been performed on it.

User Interfaces
The clearly defined operator interface and the unified invocation mechanism allows for generic execution of operators based on Alida.
In particular, generic user interfaces, like GUIs or commandline interfaces, can be generated in a fully automatic way and are well-suited for interaction
with arbitrary operators. Alida already includes user interfaces for graphical interaction based on Swing and for executing operators from commandline.

History Graphs
Analysis procedures inherently define an acyclic directed graph data structure which Alida make explicit in terms of
history graphs. They define visual representations of data analysis procedures subsuming operators, their order of
invocation and their parameters. The graphs allow for easy archival and later reconstruction of analysis procedure and
can be visualized in a comfortable manor with Chipory.

Chipory
Chipory is a comfortable graph visualization tool for exploring graph data structures. It is based on Chisio, however,
extended to meet the special requirements of Alida's history graphs.