VTKEdge was created in July 2008 in order to make the results of our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Businesses Technology Transfer (STTR) endeavors available to the open source visualization community, while satisfying the commercialization requirements of these programs.

The SBIR / STTR programs require that small businesses commercialize the results of each project; commercialization success of past projects is used to determine eligibility for future awards. In the past, Kitware has had to choose between contributing project results to our existing open source projects, which negatively impacts our commercialization history, or keeping the results proprietary and available through a commercial license. Creating VTKEdge using GPLv3 terms for licensing allows us to make technology available to the open source community while retaining the ability to license the technology to customers who wish to avoid the reciprocal terms of the GPL.

Through VTKEdge, Kitware has released advanced visualization and data processing algorithms that function within the VTK framework. In addition, Kitware has released extension modules that can be built with ParaView in order to access these new algorithms from a GUI environment. Although the initial release of VTKEdge contains only a handful of new algorithms, we expect this toolkit to grow significantly over the next few years.