Enabling Reproducible Science with VisTrails
It addresses the need for reproducible science in various domains by providing a usable system, though it is incremental in building on existing workflow concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring reproducibility in computational science by developing VisTrails, an open-source workflow system that integrates tools and automatically documents methods and parameters, leading to its adoption across many domains.
With the increasing amount of data and use of computation in science, software has become an important component in many different domains. Computing is now being used more often and in more aspects of scientific work including data acquisition, simulation, analysis, and visualization. To ensure reproducibility, it is important to capture the different computational processes used as well as their executions. VisTrails is an open-source scientific workflow system for data analysis and visualization that seeks to address the problem of integrating varied tools as well as automatically documenting the methods and parameters employed. Growing from a specific project need to supporting a wide array of users required close collaborations in addition to new research ideas to design a usable and efficient system. The VisTrails project now includes standard software processes like unit testing and developer documentation while serving as a base for further research. In this paper, we describe how VisTrails has developed and how our efforts in structuring and advertising the system have contributed to its adoption in many domains.