Vis Trails - Functionality

Functionality

A common use for VisTrails is scientific visualization. Visualizations generated as part of a workflow are rendered in a spreadsheet-style interface, allowing multiple visualizations from different versions of a workflow to be viewed and compared simultaneously. The VisTrails spreadsheet currently supports VTK and HTML rendering.

VisTrails supports four basic modes, or views. Each view interacts with the underlying workflow in a different way.

• The Pipeline view lets the user create, view and edit a visual pipeline of a workflow. The pipelines are typically rendered from top to bottom, with each module's output connecting to the input of the module(s) below it. A module corresponds roughly to a data type or a function.
• The History view displays a tree structure representing the various versions of the pipeline. Each time a change is made in the Pipeline view, a new node is added to the version tree in the History view. The user can optionally assign names, or tags, to one or more nodes of the tree. To conserve space, VisTrails does not render a node unless it is a root or leaf node or has a tag.
• The Query view is similar in appearance to the Pipeline view. Here, the user constructs partial pipelines. When the query is executed, VisTrails identifies the pipeline versions which contain the specified partial pipeline. This is analogous to the Query By Example method of performing database queries.
• The Exploration view automates the process of creating several workflow pipelines that differ only by a few parameter values.