E-science 2008

Streamlining Data Exploration and Visualization through Scientific Workflows and Provenance

by Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Claudio Silva

Summary

This tutorial will inform potential users of scientific workflows about different approaches to provenance and the trade-offs among them, so that they are able to make informed decisions when selecting or designing a provenance solution. The tutorial will also discuss uses of provenance that go beyond the ability to reproduce and share results. In particular, we will present recent techniques developed to enable knowledge re-use and to simplify the process of designing and refining workflows. Instructors will use the open-source VisTrails system and a series of examples from real applications to demonstrate how a provenance management platform can be used to streamline data analysis and visualization.