MOAB is a component for representing and evaluating mesh data. MOAB can store structured and unstructured mesh, consisting of elements in the finite element “zoo”, along with polygons and polyhedra. The functional interface to MOAB is simple, consisting of only four fundamental data types. This data is quite powerful, allowing the representation of most types of metadata commonly found on the mesh. MOAB is optimized for efficiency in space and time, based on access to mesh in chunks rather than through individual entities, while also versatile enough to support individual entity access.

The MOAB data model consists of the following four fundamental types: mesh interface instance, mesh entities (vertex, edge, tri, etc.), sets, and tags. Entities are addressed through handles rather than pointers, to allow the underlying representation of an entity to change without changing the handle to that entity. Sets are arbitrary groupings of mesh entities and other sets. Sets also support parent/child relationships as a relation distinct from sets containing other sets. The directed-graph provided by set parent/child relationships is useful for modeling topological relations from a geometric model and other metadata. Tags are named data which can be assigned to the mesh as a whole, individual entities, or sets. Tags are a mechanism for attaching data to individual entities and sets are a mechanism for describing relations between entities; the combination of these two mechanisms is a powerful yet simple interface for representing metadata or application-specific data. For example, sets and tags can be used together to describe geometric topology, boundary condition, and inter-processor interface groupings in a mesh.

MOAB's API is documented in the moab::Interface class. Questions and comments should be sent to moab-dev _at_ mcs.anl.gov.

Developer's Guide

I/O and Meta-Data Storage Conventions in MOAB

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