Common Workflow Language


The Common Workflow Language is a standard for describing computational data-analysis workflows. Development of CWL is focused particularly on serving the data-intensive sciences, such as Bioinformatics, Medical Imaging, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry. A key goal of the CWL is to allow the creation of a workflow that is portable and thus may be run reproducibly in different computational environments.
The CWL originated from discussions in 2014 between , , Nebojsa Tijanic, and at the Open Bioinformatics Foundation codefest.
CWL is supported by multiple analysis runners and platforms such as Apache Airflow, , , , , and for IBM Spectrum LSF, and was identified in 2017 as one of the future trends for bioinformatics pipeline development. Several additional analysis environments are currently implementing support for CWL including Apache Taverna and Galaxy.

Availability

CWL is developed by an informal, multi-vendor working group consisting of both organizations and individuals and is freely available via its under a permissive Apache License 2.0.