Supplement 3: Implementing FAIR Digital Objects in the EOSC-Life Workflow Collaboratory

Cite as

Carole Goble, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Finn Bacall, Stuart Owen, Alan Williams, Ignacio Eguinoa, Bert Droesbeke, Simone Leo, Luca Pireddu, Laura Rodriguez-Navas, José Mª Fernández, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, Hervé Ménager, Björn Grüning, Beatriz Serrano-Solano, Philip Ewels, Frederik Coppens (2021):
Implementing FAIR Digital Objects in the EOSC-Life Workflow Collaboratory.
Zenodo (white paper)
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4605654

Copyright and license

© 2021 Carole Goble et al. Distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international.

Changes by Stian Soiland-Reyes:

Implementing FAIR Digital Objects in the EOSC-Life Workflow Collaboratory

Carole Goble¹, Stian Soiland-Reyes¹², Finn Bacall¹, Stuart Owen¹, Alan Williams¹, Ignacio Eguinoa³⁴, Bert Droesbeke³⁴, Simone Leo⁶, Luca Pireddu⁶, Laura Rodriguez-Navas⁷, José Mª Fernández⁷, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez⁷, Hervé Ménager⁸, Björn Grüning⁹, Beatriz Serrano-Solano⁹, Philip Ewels⁵, Frederik Coppens³⁴

¹ Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
² Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
³ Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
⁴ VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology, Ghent, Belgium
⁵ Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab), Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
⁶ Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia (CRS4), Pula, Italy
⁷ Life Sciences Department. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain
⁸ Pasteur Institute, Paris, France
⁹ Bioinformatics Group, University of Freiburg, Germany

The practice of performing computational processes using workflows has taken hold in the biosciences as the discipline becomes increasingly computational [Reiter 2021]. The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the importance of systematic and shared analysis of SARS-CoV-2 and its data processing pipelines [Hufsky 2020]. This is coupled with a drive in the community towards adopting FAIR practices (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) not just for data, but also for workflows [Goble 2020], and to improve the reproducibility of processes, both manual and computational.

EOSC-Life brings together 13 of the Life Science ‘ESFRI’ research infrastructures to create an open, digital and collaborative space for biological and medical research. The project is developing a cloud-based workflow collaboratory to drive implementation of FAIR workflows across disciplines and RI boundaries, and foster tool-focused collaborations and reuse between communities via the sharing of data analysis workflows. The collaboratory aims to provide a framework for researchers and workflow specialists to use and reuse workflows. As such it is an example of the Canonical Workflow Frameworks for Research (CWFR) [Hardisty 2020] vision in practice.

EOSC-Life is made up of established research infrastructures ranging from biobanking and clinical trial management, through to coordinating biomedical imaging and plant phenotyping to multi-omic and systems-based data analysis. The heterogeneity of the disciplines is reflected in the diversity of their data analysis needs and practices and the variety of workflow management systems they use. Many have specialist platforms developed over years. Workflow management systems in common use include Galaxy [Afgan 2018], Snakemake [Köster 2012], and Nextflow [Di Tommaso 2017], and more specialist, domain-specific systems such as SCIPION [Gómez-Blanco 2018].

To serve the needs of this established and diverse community, EOSC-Life has developed WorkflowHub as an inclusive workflow registry, agnostic to any Workflow Management System (WfMS). WorkflowHub aims to incorporate their workflows in partnership with the WfMS, to embed the registration of workflows in the community processes, e.g. based on pre-existing workflow repositories.

The registry adopts common practices, e.g. use of GitHub repositories, and supports integration with the ecosystem of tool packages, assisted by registries (bio.tools [Ison 2019], BioContainers [da Veiga Leprevost 2017]), and services for testing and benchmarking workflows (OpenEBench, LifeMonitor) (Figure 1).

Overview of services in the EOSC-Life Collaboratory. Distributed from https://github.com/eosc-life/tools-collaboratory-roadmap under the Apache License, version 2.0.

EOSC-Life Collaboratory

Overview of services in the EOSC-Life Collaboratory. Distributed from https://github.com/eosc-life/tools-collaboratory-roadmap under the Apache License, version 2.0.

As an umbrella registry, the Hub makes workflows Findable and Accessible by indexing workflows across workflow management systems and their native repositories, while providing rich standardized metadata. Interoperability and Reusability is supported by standardized descriptions of workflows and packaging of workflow components, developed in close collaboration with the communities.

The WorkflowHub creates a place for registering and discovering libraries of workflows developed by collaborating teams, with suitable features for versioning, credit, analytics, and import/export needed to support the reuse of workflows, the development of sub-workflows as canonical steps and ultimately the identification of common patterns in the workflows.

At the heart of the collaboratory is a Digital Object framework for documenting and exchanging workflows annotated with machine processable metadata produced and consumed by the participating platforms. The Digital Object framework is founded on several needs:

Using these components we have built an environment that supports the Workflow Life Cycle, from abstract description, through to a specific rendering in a WfMS to its execution and the documentation of its run provenance, results and continued testing.

Funding acknowledgement

This work has received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement numbers 824087 (EOSC-Life) and 823830 (BioExcel-2) and is supported by Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) for ELIXIR Belgium (I002819N).

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