Community curation of bioinformatics software and data resources

Galaxy: A Decade of Realising CWFR Concepts

Despite recent encouragement to follow the FAIR principles, the day-to-day research practices have not changed substantially. Due to new developments and the increasing pressure to apply best practices, initiatives to improve the efficiency and reproducibility of scientific workflows are becoming more prevalent. In this article, we discuss the importance of well-annotated tools and the specific requirements to ensure reproducible research with FAIR outputs. We detail how Galaxy, an open-source workflow management system with a web-based interface, has implemented the concepts that are put forward by the Canonical Workflow Framework for Research (CWFR), whilst minimising changes to the practices of scientific communities. Although we showcase concrete applications from two different domains, this approach is generalisable to any domain and particularly useful in interdisciplinary research and science-based applications.

Perspectives on automated composition of workflows in the life sciences

Scientific data analyses often combine several computational tools in automated pipelines, or workflows. Thousands of such workflows have been used in the life sciences, though their composition has remained a cumbersome manual process due to a lack of standards for annotation, assembly, and implementation. Recent technological advances have returned the long-standing vision of automated workflow composition into focus. This article summarizes a recent Lorentz Center workshop dedicated to automated composition of workflows in the life sciences. We survey previous initiatives to automate the composition process, and discuss the current state of the art and future perspectives. We start by drawing the "big picture" of the scientific workflow development life cycle, before surveying and discussing current methods, technologies and practices for semantic domain modelling, automation in workflow development, and workflow assessment. Finally, we derive a roadmap of individual and community-based actions to work toward the vision of automated workflow development in the forthcoming years. A central outcome of the workshop is a general description of the workflow life cycle in six stages: 1) scientific question or hypothesis, 2) conceptual workflow, 3) abstract workflow, 4) concrete workflow, 5) production workflow, and 6) scientific results. The transitions between stages are facilitated by diverse tools and methods, usually incorporating domain knowledge in some form. Formal semantic domain modelling is hard and often a bottleneck for the application of semantic technologies. However, life science communities have made considerable progress here in recent years and are continuously improving, renewing interest in the application of semantic technologies for workflow exploration, composition and instantiation. Combined with systematic benchmarking with reference data and large-scale deployment of production-stage workflows, such technologies enable a more systematic process of workflow development than we know today. We believe that this can lead to more robust, reusable, and sustainable workflows in the future.

Proteomics Software in bio.tools: Coverage and Annotations

The large diversity of experimental methods in proteomics as well as their increasing usage across biological and clinical research has led to the development of hundreds if not thousands of software tools to aid in the analysis and interpretation of the resulting data. Detailed information about these tools needs to be collected, categorized, and validated to guarantee their optimal utilization. A tools registry like bio.tools enables users and developers to identify new tools with more powerful algorithms or to find tools with similar functions for comparison. Here we present the content of the registry, which now comprises more than 1000 proteomics tool entries. Furthermore, we discuss future applications and engagement with other community efforts resulting in a high impact on the bioinformatics landscape.

APE in the Wild: Automated Exploration of Proteomics Workflows in the bio.tools Registry

The bio.tools registry is a main catalogue of computational tools in the life sciences. More than 17 000 tools have been registered by the international bioinformatics community. The bio.tools metadata schema includes semantic annotations of tool functions, that is, formal descriptions of tools' data types, formats, and operations with terms from the EDAM bioinformatics ontology. Such annotations enable the automated composition of tools into multistep pipelines or workflows. In this Technical Note, we revisit a previous case study on the automated composition of proteomics workflows. We use the same four workflow scenarios but instead of using a small set of tools with carefully handcrafted annotations, we explore workflows directly on bio.tools. We use the Automated Pipeline Explorer (APE), a reimplementation and extension of the workflow composition method previously used. Moving "into the wild" opens up an unprecedented wealth of tools and a huge number of alternative workflows. Automated composition tools can be used to explore this space of possibilities systematically. Inevitably, the mixed quality of semantic annotations in bio.tools leads to unintended or erroneous tool combinations. However, our results also show that additional control mechanisms (tool filters, configuration options, and workflow constraints) can effectively guide the exploration toward smaller sets of more meaningful workflows.

biotoolsSchema: a formalized schema for bioinformatics software description

BACKGROUND

Life scientists routinely face massive and heterogeneous data analysis tasks and must find and access the most suitable databases or software in a jungle of web-accessible resources. The diversity of information used to describe life-scientific digital resources presents an obstacle to their utilization. Although several standardization efforts are emerging, no information schema has been sufficiently detailed to enable uniform semantic and syntactic description-and cataloguing-of bioinformatics resources.

FINDINGS

Here we describe biotoolsSchema, a formalized information model that balances the needs of conciseness for rapid adoption against the provision of rich technical information and scientific context. biotoolsSchema results from a series of community-driven workshops and is deployed in the bio.tools registry, providing the scientific community with >17,000 machine-readable and human-understandable descriptions of software and other digital life-science resources. We compare our approach to related initiatives and provide alignments to foster interoperability and reusability.

CONCLUSIONS

biotoolsSchema supports the formalized, rigorous, and consistent specification of the syntax and semantics of bioinformatics resources, and enables cataloguing efforts such as bio.tools that help scientists to find, comprehend, and compare resources. The use of biotoolsSchema in bio.tools promotes the FAIRness of research software, a key element of open and reproducible developments for data-intensive sciences.

The ELIXIR Human Copy Number Variations Community: building bioinformatics infrastructure for research

Copy number variations (CNVs) are major causative contributors both in the genesis of genetic diseases and human neoplasias. While “High-Throughput” sequencing technologies are increasingly becoming the primary choice for genomic screening analysis, their ability to efficiently detect CNVs is still heterogeneous and remains to be developed. The aim of this white paper is to provide a guiding framework for the future contributions of ELIXIR’s recently established human CNV Community, with implications beyond human disease diagnostics and population genomics. This white paper is the direct result of a strategy meeting that took place in September 2018 in Hinxton (UK) and involved representatives of 11 ELIXIR Nodes. The meeting led to the definition of priority objectives and tasks, to address a wide range of CNV-related challenges ranging from detection and interpretation to sharing and training. Here, we provide suggestions on how to align these tasks within the ELIXIR Platforms strategy, and on how to frame the activities of this new ELIXIR Community in the international context.

APE: A Command-Line Tool and API for Automated Workflow Composition

Automated workflow composition is bound to take the work with scientific workflows to the next level. On top of today’s comprehensive eScience infrastructure, it enables the automated generation of possible workflows for a given specification. However, functionality for automated workflow composition tends to be integrated with one of the many available workflow management systems, and is thus difficult or impossible to apply in other environments. Therefore we have developed APE (the Automated Pipeline Explorer) as a command-line tool and API for automated composition of scientific workflows. APE is easily configured to a new application domain by providing it with a domain ontology and semantically annotated tools. It can then be used to synthesize purpose-specific workflows based on a specification of the available workflow inputs, desired outputs and possibly additional constraints. The workflows can further be transformed into executable implementations and/or exported into standard workflow formats. In this paper we describe APE v1.0 and discuss lessons learned from applications in bioinformatics and geosciences.