aflak: Visual Programming Environment with Macro Support for Collaborative and Exploratory Astronomical Analysis

Abstract

This paper describes an extendable graphical framework, “aflak”, which provides a collaborative visualization environment for the analysis of multi-spectral astronomical datasets. aflak allows the astronomer to share and define analytics pipelines through a node editing interface, in which the user can compose together a set of built-in transforms (e.g. dataset import, integration, Gaussian fit) over astronomical datasets. Not only is aflak fast and responsive, but its macro can be conveniently exported, imported and shared among researchers using a custom data interchange format. aflak, while providing domain-specific features for astronomy, enables collaboration through shareability, guarantees end-to-end provenance management and achieves astronomer-in-the-loop. This paper compares aflak with conventional tools used in astronomy for specific use cases, such as the computing of equivalent widths. Finally, the paper demonstrates that aflak provides a reference implementation for the ProvenanceDM data model.