VisTrails is a new system that enables interactive multiple-view visualizations by simplifying the creation and maintenance of visualization pipelines, and by optimizing their execution. It provides a general infrastructure that can be combined with existing visualization systems and libraries.

By maintaining the provenance of both the visualization processes and data they manipulate, it enables reproducibility and simplifies the complex problem of creating and maintaining visualization products. This allows scientists to efficiently and effectively explore data through visualization: they can explore their visualization product by returning to previous versions of a dataflow (or visualization pipeline), apply a dataflow instance to different data, explore the parameter space of the dataflow, query the visualization history, and comparatively visualize different results.

Publications and Presentations

Managing Rapidly-Evolving Scientific Workflows (by Juliana Freire, Claudio T. Silva, Steven P. Callahan, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger and Huy T. Vo) Invited paper, in the proceedings of the International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW), 2006.(presentation)

Visualization in Radiation Oncology: Towards Replacing the Laboratory Notebook (by Erik W. Anderson, Steven P. Callahan, George T. Y. Chen, Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo) SCI Institute Technical Report, No. UUSCI-2006-17, University of Utah, 2006.

Using Provenance to Streamline Data Exploration through Visualization (by Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo) SCI Institute Technical Report, No. UUSCI-2006-016, University of Utah, 2006.

Managing the Evolution of Dataflows with VisTrails (by Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo) IEEE Workshop on Workflow and Data Flow for Scientific Applications (SciFlow) 2006.(presentation)

VisTrails: Visualization meets Data Management (by Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo) In Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 2006.(presentation)

VisTrails: A Short Tutorial (by Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo) Technical Report. University of Utah, 2005.

VisTrails: Enabling Interactive Multiple-View Visualizations (by Louis Bavoil, Steven P. Callahan, Patricia J. Crossno, Juliana Freire, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva and Huy T. Vo) In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization, 2005. (presentation)

Vistrails Poster

Screenshots

A few VisTrails screenshots that show different components of the system are available.

Quicktime Videos

Demonstration

• High Resolution (81MB)
• Medium Resolution (29MB)
• Low Resolution (16MB)

Radiation Oncology

• High Resolution (70MB)

System Download

A pre-alpha version of VisTrails is available here (Windows version).
The link above is password protected. You can request access information from .

A tutorial covering some of the key features of VisTrails is also available.

Principal Investigators

• Juliana Freire
• Claudio Silva

Current Team

• Erik Anderson
• Steven P. Callahan
• Emanuele Santos
• Carlos E. Scheidegger
• Nathan Smith
• Huy T. Vo
• Marcelo Nery dos Santos

Previous Members

• Louis Bavoil
• Wayne R. Tyler

Collaborators

• Antonio Baptista - Oregon Graduate Institute, Oregon Health and Sciences University
• George T.Y. Chen - Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
• Patricia Crossno - SANDIA National Laboratories

Sponsors

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0513692, CCF-0401498, EIA-0323604, CNS-0541560, and OISE-0405402, the Department of Energy, an IBM Faculty Award and a University of Utah Seed Grant.