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News

• 12/03/2012:
  The Alida concept now features a prototypical implementation in C++! It supports generic operator execution from command line.
  Release 0.1 is available now from the download page.

• 02/03/2012:
  Alida release 1.2 has just been published! You can get the new version in the download section!
  Main new feature: generic user interface generation for operators to use them from commandline and via a Swing GUI!

Alida - Advanced Library for Integrated Development of Data Analysis Applications

...formerly known as Alida - Automatic Logging of Process Information in Data Analysis

Alida defines a concept for designing libraries and toolkits in data analysis. It supports and simplifies integrated algorithm development by inherently joining algorithm implementation, automatic analysis process documentation and fully generic generation of user interfaces. In Alida each data analysis or manipulation action is realized in terms of an operator that acts on given data to produce desired output data. As all operators implement a common interface definition, their input and output parameters are accessible in a standardized manner, and they can also be invoced in a predefined way.

Calls to operators not only produce data analysis results, but are at the same time registered within the framework together with all input and output objects as well as parameters settings of the various operators. These data acquired during an analysis process and the order of operator calls form a directed graph datastructure containing all relevant information for later reconstruction or verification of the analysis procedure. Alida allows to make the directed graph datastructure explicit in terms of XML representations which can be visually explored with appropriate graphical frontends like Chipory, or might be stored in data bases for archival purposes.

Alida's operator concept is well-suited to ease algorithm development and their application to real-world problems by non-expert users. Due to the operator interface definition and the unified handling of operators it is for example possible to automatically generate user interfaces for operators, i.e. graphical frontends or commanline interfaces.

Licensing information

Alida is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) any later version as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Current releases

Java

You can download Alida's Java implementation in version 1.2 here.
You can find the API documentation for this release here.

C++

You can download Alida's prototypical C++ implementation in version 0.1 here.
You can find the API documentation for this release here.

Manual

Alida offers you a user and programmer manual you can download here. Note that the manual is currently focussed on the mature Java implementation, but it will be updated in near future to cover both implementations.

Bug reports & Feature requests

Bug reports and feature requests can be submitted via the bugtracking system or by mail to alida@informatik.uni-halle.de.
Before reporting a new bug, please check if that bug has already been submitted in the report list.