The CWL Project began out of a need for a standard to
describe analysis pipelines in a portable and reusable
manner. Common Workflow Language (CWL) is a family of standards
for the description of command line tools and of workflows made with these standards.
CWL is designed to meet the needs of data-intensive science, such as Bioinformatics, Medical Imaging, Astronomy, High Energy Physics, and Machine Learning.
The CWL project focus is on open standards, open-source code and an open community.
Vision of the CWL Project §
Researchers, scientists, and analysts share their batch data analysis workflows without technical barriers using an open standard. Sharing workflows this way is a usual occurrence and seen as a typical way of working. The workflows are complete and run on a variety of environments; and people re-use shared workflow descriptions and build new workflows from them. No vendor dominates the ecosystem
Mission of the CWL Project §
The CWL project supports open consensus-based standards for command line data analysis workflows and tools.
Specifically, we support the
- pre-standards process by providing a neutral place of convening to discuss, propose and test ideas about command-line tool based workflow standards and related topics
- standardization process by stewarding the development and delivery of standards in accordance with the OpenStand principles
- post-standards life cycle by (1) promoting the released standards, (2) developing and maintaining related training and tools, and by (3) tracking deficits and other post-standardization feedback
Citation §
To reference the Common Workflow Language and the CWL project in scholarly work, please use the following citation:
- Michael R. Crusoe, Sanne Abeln, Alexandru Iosup, Peter Amstutz, John Chilton, Nebojša Tijanić, Hervé Ménager, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Bogdan Gavrilović, Carole Goble, and The CWL Community. 2022. Methods Included: Standardizing Computational Reuse and Portability with the Common Workflow Language. Commun. ACM 65, 6 (June 2022), 54–63. https://doi.org/10.1145/3486897
To reference the CWL standards in 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/ https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3115156.v2
A collection of existing references to CWL can be found at https://zotero.org/groups/cwl