SBIR-STTR Award

The volume of information acquired and generated in the scientific community has been growing at an exponential rate. However, the absence of provenance information - e.g., who created a data product and when, when was it modified and by whom, what was the process used to create the data product - makes it hard (and sometimes impossible) to reproduce and share results, to solve problems collaboratively, to validate results with different input data, to understand the process to solve a particular problem, and to re-use the knowledge involved in the anal­ysis process. In addition, without precise and sufficient information about how the data product was generated, its value is greatly diminished. This project will design and develop an add-on mechanism to provenance-enable the top three DOE visualization applications: ParaView, VisIt, and CEI Ensight. One component of the provenance add-on is the Provenance Capture SDK, which will provide the ability to capture provenance of data manipulated by other (third-party) applications. The add-on will include a Provenance Explorer tool for users to collaboratively interrogate and re-use the provenance data. This tool will allow users to manipulate provenance data both locally and remotely through Web-based interfaces.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
The technology should find use in applications that make heavy use of simulations, data mining, and visualiza­tion. Such applications are widely used in oil and gas exploration, computational hedge funds, energy transportation, and computer-aided design and manufacturing

In the collaborative computing environment, the absence of provenance information (e.g., basic information regarding who created or modified a data product and when, the process used to create the data product, whether two data products were derived from the same raw data) makes it difficult to reproduce and share results, to solve problems collaboratively, to validate results with different input data, to understand the process used to solve a particular problem, and to re-use the knowledge involved in the anal­ysis process. This project will design and develop an add-on mechanism to provide provenance information for the top three DOE visualization applications: Para View, Visit, and Insight. In addition, a general provenance management infrastructure, which can be applied to a wide range of third-party applications, will be developed. In Phase I, functional add-on prototypes were developed for both Para View and Visit. In Phase II, production-ready add-ons will be developed for Para View, Visit, and Insight, and a Provenance Explorer software tool and soft ware development kit (SDK) will be designed and developed.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
The Provenance Explorer SDK should provide significant value in applications that make heavy use of simulations, data mining, and visualization. Such applications are widely used in oil and gas exploration, computa­tional hedge funds, energy transportation, computer-aided design and manufacturing, and 3D modeling and animation, to name a few.