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VisTrails was featured as a National Science Foundation Discovery
VisTrails Overview
VisTrails is an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system developed at the University of Utah that provides support for data exploration and visualization. Whereas workflows have been traditionally used to automate repetitive tasks, for applications that are exploratory in nature, such as simulations, data analysis and visualization, very little is repeated---change is the norm. As an engineer or scientist generates and evaluates hypotheses about data under study, a series of different, albeit related, workflows are created while a workflow is adjusted in an interactive process. VisTrails was designed to manage these rapidly-evolving workflows.
A key distinguishing feature of VisTrails is a comprehensive provenance infrastructure that maintains detailed history information about the steps followed and data derived in the course of an exploratory task: VisTrails maintains provenance of data products, of the workflows that derive these products and their executions. This information is persisted as XML files or in a relational database, and it allows users to navigate workflow versions in an intuitive way, to undo changes but not lose any results, to visually compare different workflows and their results, and to examine the actions that led to a result. It also enables a series operations and user interfaces that simplify workflow design and use, including the ability to create and refine workflows by analogy and to query workflows by example.
VisTrails supports the creation and execution of workflows. It allows the combination of loosely-coupled resources, specialized libraries, grid and Web services. The released version comes with support several packages including, VTK, Image Magick, Web Services, and pylab. You can also download several packages contributed by our users, as well as create your own packages/modules. Workflows can be run interactively, through the VisTrails GUI, or in batch using a VisTrails server.
VisTrails is written in Python and it uses the multi-platform Qt library for its user interface. It runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. You can download VisTrails from http://www.vistrails.org/index.php/Downloads
Combining VisTrails Provenance with other Tools
The VisTrails provenance infrastructure can also be combined with interactive tools. We are developing a series of provenance plugins for different tools, including VisIt and ParaView. The open-source ParaView plugin has been released.
Visualizing and Comparing Workflow Results
VisTrails provides a spreadsheet where users can compare the results of multiple workflows, or multiple workflow runs. You can also display the results of VisTrails workflows on a display wall. Users can also compare different workflows using the visual difference interface.
Sponsors
This work has been partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0905385, IIS-0844572, IIS CAREER-0746500, CNS-0751152, IIS-0513692, CCF-0401498, CNS-0541560, OISE-0405402, OCE-0424602, CNS-0524096, IIS-0534628, the Department of Energy under the SciDAC program (SDM and VACET), IBM Faculty Awards (2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008) and a University of Utah Seed Grant.
Looking for the Maya® plugin?
NOTE: This website is about the open source GPLv2 version of VisTrails. For information about the commercial plugin for Maya®, please see the VisTrails, Inc. website.