Visualization of Network Data Provenance

Abstract

Visualization facilitates the understanding of scientific data both through exploration and explanation of the visualized data. Provenance also contributes to the understanding of data by containing the contributing factors behind a result. The visualization of provenance, although supported in existing workflow management systems, generally focuses on small (medium) sized provenance data, lacking techniques to deal with big data with high complexity. This paper discusses visualization techniques developed for exploration and explanation of provenance, including layout algorithm, visual style, graph abstraction techniques, and graph matching algorithm, to deal with the high complexity. We demonstrate through application to two extensively analyzed case studies that involved provenance capture and use over three year projects, the first involving provenance of a satellite imagery ingest processing pipeline and the other of provenance in a large-scale computer network testbed.