Timeline

Since their initial publication in 2016, the CWL standards have gained much traction and are currently widely supported in practice. Below is a timeline of key moments in the evolution of the CWL Project and standards.

• 2014 Project begins from conversations at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference CodeFest
• 2015 CWL “draft-2” version
  Commercial vendor (Seven Bridges Genomics) releases product in December
• 2016 CWL v1.0 released
  Arvados support for CWL 1.0
• 2017 CWL v1.0.1 and CWL v1.0.2 released
  Toil support for CWL
  4 public implementations (cwltool, Seven Bridges, Arvados, Toil)
• 2018 IBM releases CWL implementation for LSF
• 2019 CWL v1.1 released
  CWL 2019 Mini Conference (Cambridge, MA, USA)
• 2020 CWL v1.2 released (with workflow conditionals)
  CWL included in the IEEE Std 2791™--2020 BioCompute Object standard
• 2021 2021 CWL Conference (Online)
  Support for CWL in Illumina Connected Analytics
• 2022 2022 CWL Conference (Online)
  Methods Included: Standardizing Computational Reuse and Portability with the Common Workflow Language published in Communications of the ACM by the CWL Community.
• 2023 2023 CWL Conference (Online)