Tutorials/Vis2009

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Vis 2009 Tutorial

After discussion, it seems that the tutorial is best broken into two distinct pieces: A user-centric portion focused on using VisTrails, and a power-user or developer-centric portion focusing on plug-ins, mashups, etc.

Working Outline

  • Introduction to Provenance and VisTrails (1h 30m) - Presenter: Claudio/Erik/Juliana/Manu (?)
    • Brief view of plugins and released features of VisTrails
    • Define provenance, explain why it is important for data analysis and visualization
    • Introduce VisTrails, explain the differences and similarities between VisTrails and other vis and scientific workflow systems
      • Say it is open source
      • Multi-platform: written in Python+QT
      • Downloaded 1000's of times
      • Shipped with packages: XXXYYYZZZ
      • User-contributed packages: XXXXXXX -- you can add your own! (more later)
    • Explain the version tree and the action-based provenance model
    • Show features that are enabled by the action-based provenance, and how they can help in the process of analyzing and visualizing data
      • Going back and forth on the tree
      • Automatic capture of changes
      • Compare different workflows and their results
      • Exploring parameter spaces
      • Querying workflows by example
      • Refining workflows by analogy
    • Discuss how the action-based provenance model can be combined with interactive tools
      • Give a brief overview of the plugins
      • Show videos for a couple of them and point to the detailed tutorial of how to build a plugin later.


  • Basic hands-on usage of VisTrails (1h 30m) - Presenter: Manu (?)
    • Building Simple Pipelines
    • Using PythonSource
    • Connecting to databases
    • VisTrails as a Server
  • Advanced hands-on usage of VisTrails (1h 30m) - Presenter: Erik
    • This will all be in the context of a very specific example - My first thought was to use Gil's data, as it has many very nice features that build a nice story, but problems with releasing data are pushing me towards a CMOP example.
    • Organizational principles of the History Tree - QBE, Analogies, Parameter Exploration -> New Version
    • vtkInteractionHandlers - Slicing and dicing data
    • PythonSource as callback definition - Picking specific elements
    • The workflow debugger
    • Transforming VTK pipelines into VisTrails workflows --- modified version of Dave's script to get all VTK example into a .vt, and show how to query/search that.
  • Developing a plug-in (30-40m) - Presenter: Manu (?)
    • Plug-in architecture overview
    • Different implementation strategies
    • ParaView Plug-in demo
  • New Extensions to VisTrails (50-60m) - Presenter: Claudio/Erik/Juliana/Manu (?)
    • Display Wall
    • Provenance Rich Publications
    • Mashups
    • Repository
    • Web-based execution (?)