PSICAT

The PSICAT plugin to Corelyzer is now available for download.

Simply drop the downloaded JAR file into the plugins folder of your Corelyzer installation to install the plugin. Mac Users will have to control-click on the Corelyzer application and use the Show Package Contents menu option to see the plugins folder. As soon as you restart Corelyzer, the plugin should be available via the Plugins menu.

This weekend I finished the initial work of integrating PSICAT and Corelyzer. It is now possible to export the lithological core description from PSICAT and import it into Corelyzer where you can view it next to the core images:

The implementation consists of two components: a plugin for PSICAT and a plugin for Corelyzer. The PSICAT plugin simply exports the lithological core description from PSICAT into a simple, tab-separated file format. The Corelyzer plugin parses this file and renders it into a track inside Corelyzer. This design affords the maximum amount of flexibility because there is no actual dependency on PSICAT. Other tools or databases (dbSEABED? Janus? ICDP's DIS?) can generate a properly formatted TSV file and see the results in Corelyzer. The Corelyzer plugin supports multiple lithology schemes, each of which can define any number of lithologies and associate a color and pattern with each. I've included the USGS lithology scheme that I digitized for use in PSICAT.

The plugin is built against the current Subversion version of Corelyzer, so there's easy way to distribute the plugin for others to play around with. Perhaps Julian can put up a experimental build of Corelyzer that includes the plugin.

The rest of this article will be devoted to describing the technical details behind the plugin, the lithology data format, and the lithology scheme format. I've started a discussion in the Support Forum to track bugs and missing features. Feel free to join the discussion.