Trrack: A Library for Provenance Tracking in Web-Based Visualizations

Zach Cutler, Kiran Gadhave, Alexander Lex

View presentation:2020-10-28T16:40:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2020-10-28T16:40:00Z
Exemplar figure
Four example applications using Trrack, our provenance-tracking library and TrrackVis, the associated provenance visualization library for different purposes, ranging from action recovery to logging for user studies. TrrackVis, shown on the right, utilizes custom icons, annotations, and grouping of nodes.
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Direct link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PpGhL85SEDM

Keywords

Software Architecture, Toolkit/Library, Language, Software Prototype

Abstract

Provenance tracking is widely acknowledged as an important feature of visualization systems. By tracking provenance data, visualization designers can provide a wide variety of functionality, ranging from action recovery (undo/redo), reproducibility, collaboration and sharing, to logging in support of quantitative and longitudinal evaluation. However, there is currently no widely used library that can provide that functionality. As a consequence, visualization designers either develop ad-hoc solutions that are rarely comprehensive, or don't track provenance at all. In this paper, we introduce a web-based software library – Trrack – that is designed for easy integration in existing or future visualization systems. Trrack supports a wide range of use cases, from simple action recovery, to capturing intent and reasoning, and can be used to share states with collaborators and store provenance on a server. Trrack also includes an optional provenance visualization component that supports annotation of states and aggregation of events.