Common Workflow Language

GitHub repository for www.commonwl.org: https://www.github.com/common-workflow-language/cwl-website

The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is a specification for describing analysis workflows and tools in a way that makes them portable and scalable across a variety of software and hardware environments, from workstations to cluster, cloud, and high performance computing (HPC) environments. CWL is designed to meet the needs of data-intensive science, such as Bioinformatics, Medical Imaging, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry.

CWL is developed by a multi-vendor working group consisting of organizations and individuals aiming to enable scientists to share data analysis workflows. The CWL project is maintained on Github and we follow the Open-Stand.org principles for collaborative open standards development. Legally, CWL is a member project of Software Freedom Conservancy and is formally managed by the elected CWL leadership team, however every-day project decisions are made by the CWL community which is open for participation by anyone.

CWL builds on technologies such as JSON-LD for data modeling and Docker for portable runtime environments.

User Guide

The CWL user guide provides a gentle introduction to learning how to write CWL command line tool and workflow descriptions.

CWLの日本語での解説ドキュメント is a 15 minute introduction to the CWL project in Japanese.

Specification

For developers and advanced users, the current CWL specification (v1.1) (https://github.com/common-workflow-language/cwl-v1.1) provides authoritative documentation of the execution of CWL documents. The previous version CWL specification (v1.0.2) (https://github.com/common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language/tree/master/v1.0) is also available.

Citation

To reference the CWL standards in a scholary work, please use the following citation inclusive of the DOI:

Peter Amstutz, Michael R. Crusoe, Nebojša Tijanić (editors), Brad Chapman, John Chilton, Michael Heuer, Andrey Kartashov, Dan Leehr, Hervé Ménager, Maya Nedeljkovich, Matt Scales, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Luka Stojanovic (2016): Common Workflow Language, v1.0. Specification, Common Workflow Language working group. https://w3id.org/cwl/v1.0/ doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.3115156.v2

A collection of existing references to CWL can be found at http://www.citeulike.org/group/20713

Support, Community and Contributing

The recommended place to ask a question about all things CWL is on Biostars. After you have read previous questions and answers you can post your question using the 'cwl' tag

If you are interested in learning more or contributing ideas or code, come chat with us on Gitter, check out #CommonWL on Twitter, join the mailing list common-workflow-language on Google Groups or fork the repository and send a pull request!

Code of Conduct

The CWL Project is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. This code of conduct applies to all CWL Project spaces, including the Google Group, the Gitter chat room, the Google Hangouts chats, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the leadership team.

For more details, see our Code of Conduct.

For the following content:

CWL Implementations
Repositories of CWL Tools and Workflows
Software for working with CWL
- Editors and viewers
- Utilities
- Converters and code generators
- Code libraries
Projects the CWL community is participating in
Participating Organizations
Individual Contributors
CWL Advisors
CWL Leadership team