The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is a standard for describing computational data-analysis workflows. Development of CWL is focused particularly on serving the data-intensive sciences, such as Bioinformatics, Medical Imaging, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry. A key goal of the CWL is to allow the creation of a workflow that is portable and thus may be run reproducibly in different computational environments. The CWL originated from discussions in 2014 betwee
Peter AmstutzJohn ChiltonNebojša Tijanić
an
Michael R. Crusoe
(at that time their respective affiliations were:

Galaxy A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar Sys ...

, Arvados, Seven Bridges, and

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...

) at the

Open Bioinformatics Foundation The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is a non-profit, volunteer-run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The mission of the foundation is to support the development of open source toolkits for bioinformatics, ...

br>BOSC 2014
codefest. CWL is supported by multiple analysis runners and platforms such as

Apache Airflow Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management platform for data engineering pipelines. It started at Airbnb in October 2014 as a solution to manage the company's increasingly complex workflows. Creating Airflow allowed Airbnb to programma ...

(vi
CWL-Airflow

ArvadosRabixCromwell workflow engineToilREANA - Reusable Analyses
and
CWLEXEC
for IBM Spectrum LSF, and was identified in 2017 as one of the future trends for bioinformatics pipeline development. Several additional analysis environments are currently implementing support for CWL including

Pegasus Pegasus ( grc-gre, Πήγασος, Pḗgasos; la, Pegasus, Pegasos) is one of the best known creatures in Greek mythology. He is a winged divine stallion usually depicted as pure white in color. He was sired by Poseidon, in his role as hor ...

and

Availability

The CWL Project{{cite journal , last1=Crusoe , first1=Michael R. , last2=Abeln , first2=Sanne , last3=Iosup , first3=Alexandru , last4=Amstutz , first4=Peter , last5=Chilton , first5=John , last6=Tijanić , first6=Nebojša , last7=Ménager , first7=Hervé , last8=Soiland-Reyes , first8=Stian , last9=Gavrilović , first9=Bogdan , last10=Goble , first10=Carole , last11=The CWL Community , title=Methods Included: Standardizing Computational Reuse and Portability with the Common Workflow Language , journal=Communications of the ACM , arxiv=2105.07028 , year=2022 , volume=65 , pages=54–63 , doi=10.1145/3486897, s2cid=234742536 is a multi-stakeholder working group consisting of both organizations and individuals. A member project of

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member proj ...

, it publishes the CWL standards freely available via it
GitHub repository
under a permissive Apache License 2.0.

References

External links

CWL v1.0 specification DOI

CWL website

CWL GitHub Repository

CWL entry in the EU Observatory for ICT Standardisation
Workflow languages Cloud standards Computer standards Data interchange standards