Svarog is Free Software!
You can download and use the software for free as well as modify it according to the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3.
The latest version available is Svarog 0.5.0.
Thanks for visiting Svarog's site. We hope you find the software usefull and the information provided sufficient. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask someone from the team.
Svarog is intended to be a signal viewer, annotator, analyzer and recorder. Support for recording is not yet implemented in any form, and exists only in plans for the future. Support for signal analysis methods is preliminary.
Svarog is written in Java and requires a Java virtual machine to run. Only version 1.6.0 and later are supported. We recommend you use the virtual machine distributed by Sun Microsystems. It can be obtained from Sun's Java site.
While some parts of the code are relatively well tested, this software as a whole should be considered a beta. This means that there are likely some less obvious bugs lurking in the code and that data loss is more likely than it is with stable software.
Svarog stands for Signal Viever, Analyzer and Recorder on GPL. It's a rather loose acronym. Svarog is also the name of a god (or deity) of the Sun and fire (and of the smiths) in the religion of the ancient Slavic peoples. Svarog used to be a prominent deity in central and eastern Europe prior to christianization in the Middle Ages.
Svarog is not intended to handle very simple signals (for example stereo sound files). It was designed with more complex signals in mind, epecially biosignals, such as EEG or MEG, where the signal has a few dozens of channels and is often up to 10 hours in length.
Svarog uses SignalML to load signal files. Currently only SignalML 1.0 is supported but including SignalML 2.0 support is on the roadmap.
The long term goals of Svarog are (in no particular order):
To bridge the gap between the lab (software accompanying scientific publications) and the clinic (software used as aids in solving real-life problems) by providing software which is easy enough to use for people with little technical experience, and at the same time, flexible enough for people who experiment to develop and improve clinically applicable signal analysis methods. While such perfect marriage might be difficult to achieve completely, we believe that there is room for improvement over the current situation, in which — from our experience — these two worlds are largely separate.
To provide a platform for easy exchange of data and of signal analysis methods in order to enable closer cooperation between various scientists and institutions working in the field of neuroscience. As stated in the introduction, the current situation is that it is difficult for one lab to verify the results obtained at another lab, mainly due to incompatibilities in data formats and software, and often also due to licensing problems associated with software. Creators of commercial systems have little interest in addressing such problems, especially when they bundle the software with their own hardware, and promote the whole suite. We believe that this situation hampers thorough peer review of results and clinical testing of promissing signal analysis methods.
To provide a free platform for signal recording. Recording biosignals such as EEG usually requires more sophisticated equipment than, for example, recording the latest demo tape of your garage band. There is little that could be done about the cost of required hardware. There is no reason however, why a free software for registration of such signals could not exist. Considering that equipment vendors often add a significant price premium just for slapping their proprietary software on top of third party hardware (amplifier, ADC, etc.), the existence of such a free software could reduce the overall cost of installing any diagnostic (or scientific) signal recording equipment. For some less than rich countries or institutions it might make the difference between having and not having such equipment at all. While the Open BCI project seeks to provide a low level interface for working with hardware, Svarog could become the high level interface in which the signal captured is viewed, preprocessed and saved to disk.
The short term goals of the project amount to a major spring cleaning effort, and are (in order):
After the above is achieved, we can work on extending the functionality of Svarog to achieve the long term goals.
Svarog's team is very small given the needs, and there is a lot that you could do. The FAQ has a section on ways in which people can get involved.
As a person involved in Svarog you cannot expect that your software will be used by great many people. This is a professional software targeted for a relatively narrow group of specialists: clinicists, physicians and scientists. On the other hand Svarog addresses concerns which directly relate to people's health and wellbeing. It has potential to improve the life of some people, somewhere, and as such is an important project.
