Tutorials/Vis2009

Vis 2009 Tutorial

After discussion, it seems that the tutorial is best broken into two distinct pieces: A user-centric portion focused on using VisTrails, and a power-user or developer-centric portion focusing on plug-ins, mashups, etc.

Working Outline

• Introduction to Provenance and VisTrails (1h 30m) - Presenter: Claudio/Erik/Juliana/Manu (?)
  • Brief view of plugins and released features of VisTrails
  • Define provenance, explain why it is important for data analysis and visualization
  • Introduce VisTrails, explain the differences and similarities between VisTrails and other vis and scientific workflow systems
    • Say it is open source
    • Multi-platform: written in Python+QT
    • Downloaded 1000's of times
    • Shipped with packages: XXXYYYZZZ
    • User-contributed packages: XXXXXXX -- you can add your own! (more later)
  • Explain the version tree and the action-based provenance model
  • Show features that are enabled by the action-based provenance, and how they can help in the process of analyzing and visualizing data
    • Going back and forth on the tree
    • Automatic capture of changes
    • Compare different workflows and their results
    • Exploring parameter spaces
    • Querying workflows by example
    • Refining workflows by analogy
  • Discuss how the action-based provenance model can be combined with interactive tools
    • Give a brief overview of the plugins
    • Show videos for a couple of them and point to the detailed tutorial of how to build a plugin later.

• Basic hands-on usage of VisTrails (1h 30m) - Presenter: Manu (?)
  • Building Simple Pipelines
  • Using PythonSource
  • Connecting to databases
  • VisTrails as a Server

• Advanced hands-on usage of VisTrails (1h 30m) - Presenter: Erik
  • This will all be in the context of a very specific example - My first thought was to use Gil's data, as it has many very nice features that build a nice story, but problems with releasing data are pushing me towards a CMOP example.
  • Organizational principles of the History Tree - QBE, Analogies, Parameter Exploration -> New Version
  • vtkInteractionHandlers - Slicing and dicing data
  • PythonSource as callback definition - Picking specific elements
  • The workflow debugger
  • Transforming VTK pipelines into VisTrails workflows --- modified version of Dave's script to get all VTK example into a .vt, and show how to query/search that.

• Developing a plug-in (30-40m) - Presenter: Manu (?)
  • Plug-in architecture overview
  • Different implementation strategies
  • ParaView Plug-in demo

• New Extensions to VisTrails (50-60m) - Presenter: Claudio/Erik/Juliana/Manu (?)
  • Display Wall
  • Provenance Rich Publications
  • Mashups
  • Repository
  • Web-based execution (?)