The Common Workflow Language project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy.

CWL evolved from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation’s BOSC conference as an informal collaboration between workflow system developers. The eScience Lab have participated in the Common Workflow Language project since its early days, supporting its growth into an independent project in its own right, with increasing adoption across the bioinformatics community.

We believe this transition to being a self-governed project, formally part of a legal entity with charity status, will mean that the Common Workflow Language project can progress further in its goal towards independent community development and vendor-independent workflow interoperability.

The press release below was originally posted by Software Freedom Conservancy:

Conservancy Welcomes the Common Workflow Language as a Member Project

Common Workflow Language Software Freedom Conservancy

Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Common Workflow Language (CWL) project as Conservancy’s newest member project. The project develops and maintains a specification for describing data analysis workflows and tools in a way that makes them portable and scalable across a variety of software and hardware environments, as well as a supporting reference implementation.

The Common Workflow Language project follows the OpenStand principles for collaborative open standards development to openly evolve the CWL specifications, which have already been implemented by a large number of independent vendors and open source projects. CWL has seen a large uptake by researchers, in particular in the bioinformatics community, with more than 700 public CWL workflows developed across academia and industry.

The CWL project also maintains the cwltool reference implementation, documentation, CWL tooling and libraries, as well as facilitating interactions and collaborations within the wider CWL community and related external activities.

Conservancy, a public charity focused on ethical technology, is the home of over forty projects dedicated to developing free and open source software. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella, allowing member projects to operate as charitable initiatives without having to independently manage their own corporate structure and administrative services.

"By joining Conservancy, the CWL project hopes to expand its outreach efforts across additional countries and scientific fields to promote open, reproducible science through the use of standards-based workflows for data analysis," said Peter Amstutz, co-founder of CWL and Senior Software Engineer at Veritas Genetics
"CWL is solving important problems that will make collaborating on big data analysis easier," said Karen M. Sandler, Conservancy’s Executive Director. "We’re excited to have the Common Workflow Language project join Conservancy."

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