Systematic visualisation methods for material sciences

Scientific visualisation of computational or observational data sets in material sciences is essential for studying data sets of ever increasing complexity. Rather than just using and implementing self-contained solutions to address particular problems, a systematic approach for modelling data sets opens the gateway to sharing data sets with other applications and general purpose visualisation frameworks. The fibre bundle data model is a mathematical description encompassing many diverse data types, ranging from molecular dynamics via continuum mechanics describing solid and fluids to finite elements. It fits well to be mapped to the Hierarchical Data Format file format as a widely used data storage container. Still various choices remain on such a data mapping and are reviewed in this article. The fibre bundle data model provides a classification scheme for data sets on an abstract level, disregarding implementation details and therefore eases selecting visualisation methods appropriate for the underlyin...