VisTrails

TLDR

Scientists must analyze vast data volumes, pose queries, correlate disparate data, and create visualizations, yet the current process is non‑interactive, error‑prone, and time‑consuming. The VisTrails system aims to accelerate scientific discovery by reducing the time to insight. VisTrails manages visualization data and metadata, providing a data‑management framework that streamlines visualization creation. The demonstration shows that VisTrails improves usability, reproducibility, and dramatically reduces the time needed to create scientific visualizations, addressing the bottleneck in visualization generation and maintenance.

Abstract

Scientists are now faced with an incredible volume of data to analyze. To successfully analyze and validate various hypothesis, it is necessary to pose several queries, correlate disparate data, and create insightful visualizations of both the simulated processes and observed phenomena. Often, insight comes from comparing the results of multiple visualizations. Unfortunately, today this process is far from interactive and contains many error-prone and time-consuming tasks. As a result, the generation and maintenance of visualizations is a major bottleneck in the scientific process, hindering both the ability to mine scientific data and the actual use of the data. The VisTrails system represents our initial attempt to improve the scientific discovery process and reduce the time to insight. In VisTrails, we address the problem of visualization from a data management perspective: VisTrails manages the data and metadata of a visualization product. In this demonstration, we show the power and flexibility of our system by presenting actual scenarios in which scientific visualization is used and showing how our system improves usability, enables reproducibility, and greatly reduces the time required to create scientific visualizations.