WorkflowHub project

About

This website describes the open source project for developing and running WorkflowHub: a FAIR registry for describing, sharing and publishing scientific computational workflows. The registry is sponsored by the European RI Cluster EOSC-Life, the European Research Infrastructure ELIXIR, and multiple EU-wide projects.

WorkflowHub:

• Is a domain-agnostic workflow registry designed around FAIR principles.
• Is workflow management system agnostic: workflows may remain in their native repositories in their native forms.
• Provides features such as community spaces, collections, versioning and snapshots, and contributor credit.
• Allows workflows to be FAIR, citable, have managed metadata profiles, and be openly available for review and analytics.

In addition:

• 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.
• 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 mainly sponsored by the European RI Cluster EOSC-Life, the European Research Infrastructure ELIXIR and EuroScienceGateway (see full list of acknowledgements).
• The WorkflowHub Club open community works together to continuously co-develop the Hub.

For more details, see FAIR Computational Workflows, Outreach and Publications.

For any kind of questions, or suggestions on using WorkflowHub, feel free to join our community!

Did you know?

• The first beta-release was in Sept 2020,
• Production-release was in September 2022,
• The WorkflowHub now holds over 700 workflows, including 49 curated COVID-19 workflows,
• It is a listed resource of the European COVID19 Data Portal, and is a EOSC Data Source.

Citation

If you would like to reference the WorkflowHub from academic work, please cite:

Ove Johan Ragnar Gustafsson, Sean R. Wilkinson, Finn Bacall, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Simone Leo, Luca Pireddu, Stuart Owen, Nick Juty, José Mª Fernández, Tom Brown, Hervé Ménager, Björn Grüning, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, Frederik Coppens, Carole Goble (2024):
WorkflowHub: a registry for computational workflows.
arXiv:2410.06941 [cs.DL]
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.06941

Project resources

• Tutorial videos:
  • Make your workflows findable and citable (slides)
  • WorkflowHub ask-me-anything tutorial session

Get involved

Community

While WorkflowHub is largely developed as a collaboration between several projects, any contributors are welcome to join our open community.

Anyone can join the WorkflowHub club! Either sign up on GitHub issue #1 or join the next bi-weekly Zoom call and introduce yourself.

• When: Alternate Wednesdays 10:00 current UK time zone / 11:00 current Central European time zone
• Agenda, telcon details and minutes: https://s.apache.org/workflowhub-minutes

See the list of WorkflowHub Club members on the acknowledgements page.

For asynchronous communication, see also:

• Mailing list: workflowhub😊elixir-europe.org (subscribe/archive)
• Slack chat: #workflows on seek4science.slack.com (join)
• Google Drive: to request write-access, ask in Slack channel

Development

Created as part of the EOSC-Life WP2 Tools Collaboratory, WorkflowHub is in production but still under active development. See the roadmap page for a list of in-flight and future development activities.

You can also see a complete list of contributors on the acknowledgements page.

Contact Us

The production instance https://workflowhub.eu/ is hosted by eScience Lab at The University of Manchester led by professor Carole Goble.

• Provide feedback or ask questions
• Contribute to WorkflowHub club
• Report an issue (public GitHub), or:
  • Contact workflowhub.eu system administrators: workflowhub-admin@listserv.manchester.ac.uk
  • Report Code of Conduct concerns: info@esciencelab.org.uk
• Academic collaborations: carole.goble@manchester.ac.uk

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.

Code of conduct

This project has a Code of Conduct to ensure interactions are friendly, respectful and inclusive. You can contact info@esciencelab.org.uk if you have any concerns or questions.

Retention and End-of-Life policy

WorkflowHub’s sustainability plan is to ensure the availability of its contributions and metadata up to and beyond 2027. 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.

Governance

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for contributions from EOSC-Life, ELIXIR Europe, EuroScienceGateway and others (see complete list of funders).