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

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, no widely used library that can provide that functionality is current available. As a consequence, visualization designers either develop ad hoc solutions that are rarely comprehensive, or do not 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.