An open statistical system
A great number of professionals apply statistical methods and techniques in their everyday work. These include scientists and researchers in many fields, such as medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, sociology, economics, and metrology, working in the governmental or industrial sector. While most of the commercially available statistical application software packages meet well-known professional user requirements, they are closed systems lacking the necessary extensibility features to resolve all raised problems. Urged by these needs, this project resulted in the design of a statistical application-building environment called the STABLE system that offers its users increased capabilities in statistical computation. The system is the end result of a unique combination of fast and robust algorithms for performing statistical analysis and visual programming. Primarily, the STABLE system is a professionally developed statistical package for lightning fast and accurate calculations and implementing highly complicated statistical techniques. Moreover, it is a completely open environment for designing highly specialised task or end-user applications. More specifically, the system includes all the necessary resources for setting up ready to use applications, integrating alternative or customised user interfaces as well as user developed code. With the aid of gateways, it is highly adaptable to existing external systems. The system may also be used for thorough investigation of new algorithms. Most interestingly, the user is provided with the visual programming paradigm and has the potential to explore new means of statistical data visualisation. Designated for two user groups - expert statisticians and application and system developers - the STABLE is foreseen as a "next generation" statistical and visualisation system. Although the system addresses the needs of expert user groups, the customised applications produced within the STABLE environment will facilitate the introduction of difficult statistical methodologies even to non-expert users for practice.