Provenance for Visualizations: Reproducibility and Beyond

Abstract

The demand for the construction of complex visualizations is growing in many disciplines of science, as users are faced with ever increasing volumes of data to analyze. In this paper, the authors present VisTrails, an open source provenance-management system that provides infrastructure for data exploration and visualization. VisTrails transparently records detailed provenance of exploratory computational tasks and leverages this information beyond just the ability to reproduce and share results. In particular, it uses this information to simplify the process of exploring data through visualization.