Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab have released ParaView 3.6.2. The latest release now includes the VisTrails Provenance Explorer plugin in the Windows and Linux packages. VisTrails is an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system developed at the SCI Institute that provides support for data exploration and visualization.

The VisTrails Pplugin brings provenance tracking and many of the benefits of provenance to ParaView users. It automatically and transparently tracks the steps a user followed to create a visualization. In contrast to the traditional undo/redo stack, which is cleared whenever new actions are performed, the plugin captures the complete exploration trail as a user explores different parameters and visualization techniques. A tree-based view of the history of actions allows a user to return to a previous version in an intuitive way, undo bad changes, compare different visualizations, and be reminded of the actions that led to a particular result. Also, there is no limit on the number of operations that can be undone, no matter how far back in the history of the visualization they are. Last, but not least, the history is persistent across sessions. The VisTrails plugin can save all of the information needed to restore any state of the visualization in .vt files, which can be reloaded across ParaView sessions and shared among collaborators. This also allows multiple visualizations to be shared with a single file.

For more detials about improvements in the latest release see the announcement on the Kitware website: ParaView 3.6.2 Now Available. ParaView binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView Software Page.