Introducing the VisTrails Provenance Explorer Plugin for ParaView

In order to analyze and validate various hypotheses, it is necessary to create insightful visualizations of both the simulated processes and observed phenomena, using powerful data analysis and visualization tools like ParaView. But to explore data through visualization, scientists need to go through several steps. They need to select data products and specify series of operations that need to be applied to these data to create appropriate visual representations before they can finally view and analyze the results. 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 visualization data products has become a major bottleneck in the scientific process, hindering not only the ability to mine scientific data, but the actual use of scientific data in every day applications. In particular, scientists and engineers need to expend substantial effort managing data (e.g., scripts that encode computational tasks, raw data, data products, and notes) and record provenance (history) information so that basic questions can be answered, such as: Who created a data product and when? When was it modified and by whom? What was the process used to create the data product? Were two data products derived from the same raw data?