Probe-It! Visualization Support for Provenance

Visualization is a technique used to facilitate the understanding of scientific results such as large data sets and maps. Provenance techniques can also aid in increasing the understanding and thus acceptance of scientific results by providing access to information about the sources and methods which were used to derive them. Visualization and provenance techniques, although rarely used in combination, may further increase scientists’ understanding of results since the scientists may be able to use a single tool to see and evaluate result derivation processes including any final or partial result. In this paper we introduce ProbeIt!: a visualization tool of scientific provenance information that enables scientists to move the visualization focus from intermediate and final results to provenance back and forth. To evaluate the benefits of Probe-It!, in the context of maps, this paper presents a quantitative user study on how the tool was used by scientists to discriminate between quality results and results with known imperfections. The study demonstrates that only a very small percentage of the scientists tested can identify imperfections using maps without the help of knowledge provenance and that most scientists, whether GIS experts, subject matter experts (i.e., experts on gravity data maps) or not, can identify and explain several kinds of map imperfections when using maps together with knowledge provenance visualization.