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)