[Insight-developers] More justification for programs like ITK...

[Luis Ibanez]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Terry Yoo <tyoo at mail.nih.gov> wrote:
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/full/467775a.html?ref=nf
>
> Terry S. Yoo, PhD
> Office of High Performance Computing and Communications
> National Library of Medicine
> National Institutes of Health
> tyoo at mail.nih.gov
>
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Indeed !!

In that article Zeeya Merali explicitly mentions VTK as an example
on how to overcome the crisis of scientific computing by building
collaboration platforms.

Quote:

"Some software developers have found ways to combat the growth of
monster code. One example is the Visualization Toolkit, an
open-source, freely available software system for three-dimensional
computer graphics. People can modify the software as they wish, and it
is rerun each night on every computing platform that supports it, with
the results published on the web. The process ensures that the
software will work the same way on different systems."

and Merali, immediately put the finger in the problem:

"That kind of openness has yet to infiltrate the scientific research
world, where many leading science journals, including Nature, Science
and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do not insist
that authors make their code available. Rather, they require that
authors provide enough information for results to be reproduced."


We elaborated on these topics in this blog post:

        http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/67


The rationale, of course, applies as well to ITK.


An excellent complement to Merali's article is the Nature's article

"Publish your Computer Code: It's good enough..."
by Nick Barnes
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/full/467753a.html



    Luis