VisTrails

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VisTrails
Latest release 1.1 / May 16, 2008
Written in Python
OS Cross-platform
Genre Scientific workflow management; Scientific visualization
License GPL
Website http://www.vistrails.org

VisTrails is a scientific workflow management system developed at the University of Utah that provides support for data exploration and visualization. It is written in Python and employs Qt via PyQt bindings. The system is open source, released under the GPL v2 license. The pre-compiled versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux come with an installer and several packages, including VTK, matplotlib, and Image Magick. VisTrails also supports user-defined packages.

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[edit] Brief Description

VisTrails is a new system that provides provenance management support for exploratory computational tasks. It combines features of workflow and visualization systems. Similar to workflow systems, it allows the combination of loosely-coupled resources, specialized libraries, and grid and Web services. Similar to some visualization systems, it provides a mechanism for parameter exploration and comparison of different results. But unlike these other systems, VisTrails was designed to manage exploratory processes in which computational tasks evolve over time as a user iteratively formulates and tests hypotheses. A key distinguishing feature of VisTrails is its comprehensive provenance infrastructure that maintains detailed history information about the steps followed in the course of an exploratory task. VisTrails leverages this information to provide novel operations and user interfaces that streamline this process.

VisTrails has been developed for exploratory visualization[1], but the system is general, and provides functionality in the following areas:

  • Flexible Provenance Architecture [2][3].
  • Querying and Re-using History [4].
  • Support for collaborative exploration [5].
  • Extensibility.
  • Scalable Derivation of Data Products, Parameter Exploration, Multi-View and Comparative Visualization [6].

[edit] References

  1. ^ Provenance for Visualizations: Reproducibility and Beyond. Claudio T. Silva, Juliana Freire, and Steven Callahan. Computing in Science & Engineering, 9(5), pp. 82-90, 2007.
  2. ^ Provenance for Computational Tasks: A Survey. Juliana Freire, David Koop, Emanuele Santos, and Claudio T. Silva. Computing in Science & Engineering, 10(3), pp. 11-21, 2008.
  3. ^ Tackling the Provenance Challenge one layer at a time. Carlos E. Scheidegger, David Koop, Emanuele Santos, Huy T. Vo, Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, and Claudio T. Silva. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 20(5), pp. 473-483, 2008.
  4. ^ Querying and Creating Visualizations by Analogy. Carlos E. Scheidegger, Huy T. Vo, David Koop, Juliana Freire and Claudio T. Silva. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13(6), pp. 1560-1567, 2007.
  5. ^ Using Provenance to Support Real-Time Collaborative Design of Workflows. Tommy Ellkvist, David Koop, Erik Anderson, Juliana Freire, and Claudio T. Silva. Proceedings of International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW), 2008.
  6. ^ VisTrails: Enabling Interactive Multiple-View Visualizations. Louis Bavoil, Steven P. Callahan, Patricia J. Crossno, Juliana Freire, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo. Proceedings of IEEE Visualization, pp. 135-142, 2005.

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