VisTrails

VisTrails

Developer(s)	University of Utah, NYU-Poly
Stable release	2.2.4 / 2016-05-03
Written in	Python
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Scientific workflow management; Scientific visualization
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://www.vistrails.org/

VisTrails is a scientific workflow management system developed at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah that provides support for data exploration and visualization. It is written in Python and employs Qt via PyQt bindings. The system is open source, released under the GPL v2 license. The pre-compiled versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux come with an installer and several packages, including VTK, matplotlib, and ImageMagick. VisTrails also supports user-defined packages.

VisTrails is a new system that provides provenance management support for exploratory computational tasks. It combines features of workflow and visualization systems. Similar to workflow systems, it allows the combination of loosely coupled resources, specialized libraries, and grid and Web services. Similar to some visualization systems, it provides a mechanism for parameter exploration and comparison of different results. But unlike these other systems, VisTrails was designed to manage exploratory processes in which computational tasks evolve over time as a user iteratively formulates and tests hypotheses. A key distinguishing feature of VisTrails is its comprehensive provenance infrastructure that maintains detailed history information about the steps followed in the course of an exploratory task. VisTrails leverages this information to provide novel operations and user interfaces that streamline this process.

VisTrails has been developed for exploratory visualization, but the system is general, and provides functionality in the following areas:

VisTrails is the result of a collaborative effort between computer scientists Cláudio Silva and Juliana Freire. Initial development began in 2004 by graduate students at the University of Utah. Although the first prototypes were implemented in C++, the current version of VisTrails is written in Python. The first public release was in September 2007.