Multidimensional Data Sets - Presentation, Evaluation and Extraction

Micro-X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (μ-XRF) can measure element dependent intensity distributions. This creates multidimensional data sets which contain the intensities for different energies in dependence of the spatial coordinates. Elemental distributions give a good impression about the general structure of a sample and about the different composition of special objects in the investigated material. But these measurements can generate very large data sets – in dependence of the size of the analyzed area from several 100 MBytes to even considerably more than 1 GByte. This offers the question: How to handle these large data sets for their effective presentation as well as for the extraction of the information of interest, for the objectification of the content or for the fast comparison with other distributions. This is a question which is relevant not only for elemental distributions measured by μXRF but also for distributions of other parameters measured with other methods for example phases measured with XRD, compounds measured with IRor UV-spectroscopy or temporal changes of special parameters measured with in time resolved measurements.