__NOTOC__ Kitware, Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Clifton Park, New York. The company is involved in the research and development of

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

in the fields of

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

medical imaging Medical imaging is the technique and process of imaging the interior of a body for clinical analysis and medical intervention, as well as visual representation of the function of some organs or tissues (physiology). Medical imaging seeks to rev ...

visualization Visualization or visualisation may refer to: *Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message * Data visualization, the graphic representation of data * Information visualiz ...

, 3D data publishing, and technical

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...

History

The company was founded in 1998 by Will Schroeder, Ken Martin, Lisa Avila, Charles Law and Bill Hoffman to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). VTK was initially created in 1993 by Schroeder, Martin and Bill Lorensen as companion software to “The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics," originally published by

Prentice-Hall Prentice Hall was an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market, and distributes its technical titles through the Safari B ...

VTK The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open-source software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and scientific visualization.''Visualization Handbook'', Academic Press, 2005, Chapter 30: the Visualization Toolkit/ref> VTK is distrib ...

As VTK was released open source, a user community developed around the software and the founders of Kitware took this opportunity to start the business. Later, the company expanded its focus and offerings to include development in other areas such as biomedical imaging, large data visualization, quality software process,

informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems, especially those for data storage and retrieval. According to ACM ''Europe and'' ''Informatics Europe'', informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which ...

, and data management. The company has four additional offices: Carrboro, North Carolina; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Arlington, Virginia; and Kitware SAS, the European office, in Lyon, France. Kitware contributes to many popular open-source projects, such as

and

CMake In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is not a build system itself; it generates an ...

References

{{Authority control Companies based in New York (state) Data visualization software