WEBVTT

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In many scientific fields such as
bioinformatics, medical imaging, and

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astronomy
large quantities of data need to be

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analyzed. This can involve large-scale
and repetitive processes in long

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pipelines of different tools — referred to
as workflows. It can be very

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time-consuming to run data for all these
different tools by hand and convert

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outputs to various formats to make them
compatible with the next step.

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Workflow management systems are designed
to alleviate this problem by allowing

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these workflows to be expressed formally
and providing infrastructure to set up.

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execute, and monitor them. This formal
expression of workflows allows for

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scientists to easily share and reuse
them. Crucially they can also be used to

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verify results of computation for
published work. However there are many

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competing [ways] for describing
workflows which is a barrier to this aim.

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Currently there are over a hundred
different data analysis workflow systems

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with no interoperability between them.
The need has arisen to have a single

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common standard and so the "Common
Workflow Language" project was created: an

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open standard designed to express
workflows and their tooling in groups of

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YAML structured text files.