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    Bringing Scientific Workflows to the EOSC

    Scientific studies are using an increasing number of workflows that require the use of methods and tools from different life science domains. Bringing such a workflow to the EOSC environment allows it to be collaboratively developed, used, re-used, and combined. WP2 in EOSC-Life addressed these challenges by making these tools and workflows Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) in the EOSC, so that life science research infrastructure (LS RI) users and the broad scientific community could take full advantage of the EOSC by accessing a common set of resources and environment.

    To achieve this objective, EOSC-Life needed to create suitable workflow metadata standards, a workflow registry to support findability, support the adoption and use of workflow testing to make maintenance easier, and to encourage the adoption of cloud technologies. These efforts enabled the workflows to be implemented on EOSC-compatible cloud infrastructures.

    It is noteworthy that the WP2 roadmap is finding adoption beyond the life sciences, for example,
    through EOSC-Life collaboration with the EOSC-Nordic project on the Climate Science Workbench used to
    build climate models.

    This EOSC-Life WP resulted in three Deliverables:

    and numerous publications.

    Several other EOSC-Life WPs contributed to achieving the objectives related to FAIR tools and workflows:

    Technical Roadmap of EOSC-Life-supported Technologies and Standards

    Early on in the EOSC-Life project, reviews of online materials and publications related to LS-RI activities, as well as informal discussions with individual researchers in some of the RIs at the project kick-off meeting, enabled a range of tools and workflow systems in common use to be identified. This list was subsequently complemented by a survey of the EOSC-Life science Demonstrators.

    Based on this information, WP2 developed a technical roadmap that highlights technologies and standards that could be readily supported in the project. These included the Linux operating system, the Conda package manager, Singularity (and/or Docker) for containerisation, CWL for describing data analysis workflows, Nextflow for running workflows on the command line, and the Galaxy platform as a web-based UI for building and running data analysis workflows. The interest in using RStudio and Jupyter notebooks also grew steadily during the project.

    EOSC-Life workflow collaboratory

    Workflow specification and management systems