Finding workflows in the Galaxy universe: integrating a global ecosystem using workflow registries
Creators: name: Gustafsson, Ove Johan Ragnar
name: Soranzo, Nicola
name: Gruening, Bjoern
name: van den Beek, Marius
name: Bacall, Finn
name: Goble, Carole
name: Zaib Khan, Farah
name: Price, Gareth
name: Ward, Nigel
name: Christiansen, Jeff
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: Galaxy
Workflows
FAIR
Registries

description: The Galaxy framework democratises the ability to create and maintain complex computational workflows, empowering subject matter experts across diverse research fields to design and run their own analyses without worrying about the underlying infrastructure that makes tool execution in the cloud possible. The underlying framework however does not remove the need to invest expertise, time and effort in the development, testing and optimisation of these workflows. It is this investment that underpins needing to make workflows findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR): creators of workflows should be able to effectively share their work and see it reused and cited, while workflow users should be facilitated to find these workflows effortlessly. Galaxy already excels in the reusability of workflows that are described in a standardised way. It is findability that can be challenging, as Galaxy workflows are created within an instance and this does not currently translate to visibility across the more than 130 public servers in the global Galaxy network. In effect, a Galaxy Europe user might replicate a workflow that a user in Australia has already created and vice versa. Wouldn’t the intergalactic neighbourhood seem a bit smaller if the workflow contributions across this neighbourhood were findable? We suggest that workflow visibility across Galaxies is indispensable in the Galaxy universe. Community efforts are leading the way in addressing this for canonical best practice workflows: i.e. through the Intergalactic Workflows Commission (IWC). With the right support, there is also an opportunity to engage the broader research community in this effort and provide clear pathways to make thousands of existing and new Galaxy workflows searchable, understandable and citable. This poster highlights the key steps a workflow creator in Galaxy can take to make their work findable, well annotated and citable: in doing so it draws together and articulates the breadth of efforts across the Galaxy project related to workflows, including Galaxy workflow best practices and RO-crate export, registration of workflows (IWC and others) on platforms like WorkflowHub and Dockstore, and sustainable maintenance through the use of community templates (IWC, template generators) and the application of tools like LifeMonitor. Our aim is to provide a roadmap for success, whereby currently available platforms, services and tools that improve the visibility and reusability of Galaxy workflows can be clearly described and easily accessible to end users and workflow developers, and also be placed in the context of day-to-day research practice. We would like this poster to help stimulate discussion at the conference, and continue evolving this guidance material together with the Galaxy and workflow communities. This will allow us to incorporate new and aspirational elements of the ecosystem, ensure that the Galaxy platform can continue supporting established research communities, and provide a compelling case for new users to adopt the Galaxy framework to support their research.
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