History for Minutes 19 December 2005

changed:
-
Meeting held 11am 19 December 2005

Present: Carey, Greg, Karl, Shane, Travis, Andre, Poul

Genral: Andre questioned whether we had infact decided on the language and compilers, we have.


1 Starting work : Data structures.

    * What are our fundamental types?

    * What is the basic interface?

    This wiki has some descriptions of the [cmgui data structures] and [cm field parameters]

    Karl has looked in the mesh API for TSTT, interestingly it provides a way to ask a mesh if it has some feature.
 
    Fortran 95's lack of function pointers may complicate an object oriented API .

    API or Datastructures first? We define the API then implement the datastructures that resemble the public interface.

    Scope (Regions)

    * Fields - Values you can calculate

    * Nodes - Values

    * Element - Interpolation of nodes, a collection of which form a field

    no more grid points, data points, collocation points, images

    Much discussion of what these concepts are and what they store.

    * Should location information be treated different from field information?

    * Elements could represent the FEM idea or the notion of a coordinate system embedded within another. 
      eg an element could have topology, coordinate system and bounds, basis are then used to describe fields over it. 

    * Poul has the following concepts from his research for FieldML.

      * Point - position wrt to a coordinate system

      * Coordinate system (aka element) - dimension, limits on coordinate values

      * Basis functions/Interpolation

      * Field parameters

      * For talking about mehes, the notion of a field that glues together elements is missing   

      * Further info on this can be found at "FieldML on the Physiome site":http://www.physiome.org.nz/xml_languages/fieldml  

    * Shane expresses concerns, that while there are some good concepts in the FieldML work, we need something implemented in 3 months.


out of time....


2 Development framework. 

    * How are we going to develop code? 

    * What documentation systems, bug systems, code management systems do we want to employ?

3 Future Meetings.

    * Field operators:  Should we have mathmatical operators at a low field level?