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About WorkflowHub

  • WorkflowHub is a new workflow registry designed around FAIR principles.
  • WorkflowHub allows workflows to be FAIR, citable, have managed metadata profiles, and be openly available for review and analytics.
  • Workflows are packaged, registered, downloaded and exchanged as workflow-centric Research Objects using the RO-Crate specification, with test and example data, managed metadata profiles, citations and more.
  • A schema.org based Bioschemas profile describes the metadata about a workflow and use of the Common Workflow Language is encouraged, providing a canonical description of the workflow itself.
  • Popular workflow management systems such as Galaxy, Nextflow, and Snakemake are working with the Hub to seamlessly and automatically support object packaging, registration and exchange.
  • WorkflowHub is workflow management system agnostic: workflows may remain in their native repositories in their native forms.
  • WorkflowHub provides features such as community spaces, collections, versioning and snapshots, and contributor credit.
  • In addition to its own APIs, WorkflowHub supports community registry standards and services such as GA4GH TRS and ELIXIR-AAI authentication, and current work integrates with the LifeMonitor workflow testing service.
  • WorkflowHub is sponsored by the European RI Cluster EOSC-Life and the European Research Infrastructure ELIXIR.
  • The WorkflowHub Club open community works together to continuously co-develop the Hub.
  • Beta-released in Sept 2020, the Hub now holds nearly 100 workflows, including 36 curated COVID-19 workflows. It is a listed resource of the European COVID19 Data Portal.

WfCommons and WorkflowHub

Note that the US-based WfCommons, a Python-based framework for enabling scientific workflow research and development, was previously called “WorkflowHub”. While that framework is not related to our registry workflowhub.eu, this name collision could cause some confusion, so in common agreement with Rafael Ferreira da Silva, their former domain name workflowhub.org now kindly redirect to our workflow registry https://workflowhub.eu/, their framework was renamed to “WfCommons” and moved to https://wfcommons.org/ and their Python package workflowhub was renamed wfcommons.

Development

Created as part of the EOSC-Life WP2 Tools Collaboratory, WorkflowHub is in beta, and still under active development.

See a complete list of contributors on the acknowledgement page.

Aims of the project include:

  • Evolvement of myExperiment that is workflow system agnostic, supports a repository of workflows in native and standardised form (e.g. CWL and the virtual aggregation of established tool, workflow and registries to support discovery over a fragmented ecosystem. The federated registry would support a common API to simplify access for tool developers.
  • Standardised workflow identifiers and metadata descriptions needed for workflow discovery, reuse, preservation, interoperability and monitoring and metadata harvesting using standard protocols. Workflows are usually multi-component (requiring links to test data, example runs, explanatory documentation, etc) and used in collections for scientific use cases. We plan to use the Research Object specification for packaging workflows, which has already been combined with CWL and is part of the BioComputeObject specification.
  • Workflow snapshot preservation, publishing, citation and monitoring, credit claiming and workflows part of the scholarly communication landscape partnering with platforms like DataCite and EOSC’s OpenAIRE and their Research Community Dashboards linking publications with workflows, associated datasets, software, etc.
  • The workflow registry is planned to be based on the SEEK platform using Common Workflow Language and Research Objects to glue in federated workflow and tool descriptions across the research infrastructures.

Retention and End-of-Life policy

WorkflowHub’s sustainability plan is to ensure the availability of its contributions and metadata up to and beyond 2026. If and when the WorkflowHub reaches its end of service after that, the published contributions and metadata will be archived as RO-Crates and made available through a public repository, such as Zenodo, Figshare or another appropriate resource at that time. DOI registrations will in this case be updated to link to the archived deposits.