Digital assets are generally managed by storing an end result along with a few other intermediate snapshots. With VisTrails technology, each step that is taken in the creation or evolution of your digital asset is captured in a visual trail with the following benefits:

• Branching - Design decisions are captured in various branches of the trail, creating a history tree for your asset.
• Interactivity - You can easily return to any step in the visual trail
• Persistance - The trail can be saved with or in place or your asset

-George Santayana

By reusing steps that are performed in the creation of a digital asset, new assets can be quickly created and existing assets can be easily modified. With a simple yet powerful copy and paste operation, you can repurpose and rework your assets:

• Repurpose - Capture frequently used steps and apply them during the creation of new assets
• Rework - Modify an asset at any stage in its development by returning to a step, modifying the asset, then applying subsequent steps to the modification

Whether you are a trainer for new users of a software package or an experienced user showing off your skills, VisTrails offers the tools to speed up the education and learning processes.

• Annotate - Tag important steps and annotate them to assist others in learning how and why something was done
• Playback - Play through each step in a trail to get an animated view of how an asset was created

How was my digital asset created? How could it have been made more efficient? How does it differ from my other assets? Provenance analytics can answer these questions with the following tools:

• Compute statistics - Use automatically captured metadata to compute usage and timing statistics for a project
• Compare - Visually compare the differences between assets, their specifications, and their histories

Instead of managing a digital asset outside of the application that created it, manage it inside the application with version control operations such as tagging, branching, differencing, and merging.

With our technology, you'll never lose another digital asset or the intellectual property that went into its creation. A full trail of a digital asset can satisfy the needs for the auditing of your own work or contract work performed off-site. We provide several tools to assist in securing your data:

• Encapsulate - Keep all of your iterations or experiments in one visual trail instead of disjoint assets representing different versions
• Autosave - Does the software you use crash fequently? Do you forget where you saved your files? Our handy autosave features ensure you never lose another minute of productivity.