Cite as

Paul De Geest, Frederik Coppens, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Ignacio Eguinoa, Simone Leo (2022):
Enhancing RDM in Galaxy by integrating RO-Crate.
1st International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects (FDO 2022) (poster)
Research Ideas and Outcomes 8:e95164
https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.8.e95164

Enhancing RDM in Galaxy by integrating RO-Crate

Paul De Geest¹, Frederik Coppens¹, Stian Soiland-Reyes²³, Ignacio Eguinoa¹, Simone Leo⁴

Abstract

We introduce how the Galaxy research environment integrates with RO-Crate as an implementation of Findable Accessible Interoperable Reproducible Digital Objects and how using RO-Crate as an exchange mechanism of workflows and their execution history helps integrate Galaxy with the wider ecosystem of ELIXIR and EOSC to enable FAIR and reproducible data analysis.

RO-Crate [Soiland-Reyes 2022] is a generic packaging format containing datasets and their description using standards for FAIR Linked Data. The format is based on schema.org [Guha 2016] annotations in JSON-LD, which allows for rich metadata representation. The RO-Crate effort aims to make best-practice in formal metadata description accessible and practical for use in a wider variety of situations, from an individual researcher working with a folder of data, to large data-intensive computational research environments.

The RO-Crate community brings together practitioners from very different backgrounds, and with different motivations and use-cases. Among the core target users are:

• researchers engaged with computation and data-intensive, workflow-driven analysis;
• digital repository managers and infrastructure providers;
• individual researchers looking for a straight-forward tool or how-to guide to “FAIRify” their data;
• data stewards supporting research projects in creating and curating datasets.

Given the wide applicability of RO-Crate and the lack of practical implementations of FDOs, ELIXIR [Harrow 2021] co-opted this initiative as the project to define a common format for research data exchange and repository entries. Thus, during the last year it’s been implemented in a wide range of services, such as: WorkflowHub [Goble 2021] (a registry for describing, sharing and publishing scientific computational workflows) uses RO-Crates as an exchange format to improve reproducibility of computational workflows that follow the Workflow RO-Crate profile [Bacall 2022b]; LifeMonitor [Leo 2022] (a service to support the sustainability of computational workflows being developed as part of the EOSC-Life project) uses RO-Crate as an exchange format for describing test suites associated with workflows.

Tools have been developed towards aiding the previously mentioned use-cases and increasing the general usability of RO-Crates by providing a user-friendly (programmatic) interface for consumption – and production of RO-Crates through programmatic libraries for consuming/producing RO-Crates (ro-crate-py [De Geest 2022], ro-crate-ruby [Bacall 2022a, ro-crate-js [Lynch 2021]).

The Galaxy project [Jalili 2020] provides a research environment with data analysis and data management functionalities as a multi user platform, aiming to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming or systems administration experience. As such, it stores not just analysis related data but also the complete analytical workflow, including its metadata. The internal data model involves the history entity, including all steps performed in a specific analysis, and the workflow entity, defining the structure of an analytical pipeline.

From the start, Galaxy aims to enable reproducible analyses by providing capabilities to export (and import) all the analysis history details and workflow data and metadata in a FAIR way. As such it helps its users with the daily research data management. The Galaxy community is continuously improving and adding features, the integration of the FAIR Digital Object principles is a natural next step in this.

To be able to support these FDOs, Galaxy leverages the RO-Crate Python client library [De Geest 2022] and provides multiple entry points to import and export different research data objects representing its internal entities and associated metadata. These objects include:

1. a workflow definition, which is used to share/publish the details of an analysis pipeline, including the graph of tools that need to be executed, and metadata about the data types required
2. individual data files or a collection of datasets related to an analysis history
3. a compressed archive of the entire analysis history including the metadata associated with it such as the tools used, their versions, the parameters chosen, workflow invocation related metadata, inputs, outputs, license, author, CWLProv description [Khan 2019] of the workflow, contextual references (DOIs), EDAM terms [Ison 2013], etc.

The adoption of RO-Crate by Galaxy allows a standardised exchange of FDOs with other platforms in the ELIXIR Tools ecosystem, such as WorkflowHub and LifeMonitor. Integrating RO-Crate deeply into Galaxy and offering import and export options of various Galaxy objects as Research Objects allows for increased standardisation, improved RDM functionalities, smoother UX as well as improved interoperability with other systems.

RO-Crate integration in a platform used by biologists to do data intensive analysis, facilitates the publication of workflows and workflow invocations for all skill levels, democratising the ability to perform Open Science.

Presenting author

Paul De Geest

Submitted to be presented at

First International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects, poster

• Poster: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7257146

References

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[Bacall 2022b] Finn Bacall, Alan R. Williams, Stuart Owen, Stian Soiland-Reyes (2022):
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