Australian BioCommons Workflow Commons

Vision

Australian life scientists can discover, understand, and execute priority workflows that underpin their research programs.

Challenges

Molecular analyses methods are continuously evolving, as new instrument types are rolled out, and more data is generated with existing instruments. These changes mean that researchers increasingly need to analyse larger and more complex datasets.

Using computational workflows to encode data analysis allows methods to be discovered, shared, validated, executed and reused across the life sciences community - lowering the barrier to accessing new analysis methods.

However, it is difficult for research communities to keep up with the constant evolution of computational workflows. One of the most frequent requests from researchers is: how do we apply this new workflow to our data? 

These challenges call for an ecosystem of services and platforms that allow Australian life scientists to discover, understand, and execute priority workflows that underpin their research programs.

Approach

Australian BioCommons has established the Workflow Commons in response to the above challenges.

The Workflow Commons aims to:

  • Address challenges in workflow discovery, creation, sharing, validation, execution, and reuse in collaboration with workflow developers, users and infrastructure providers

  • Develop and deploy priority workflows that address emerging data analysis requirements in consultation with the life science community 

  • Improve the FAIRness of workflows via an ecosystem of services, training and support.

Australian BioCommons is collaborating with our partners at Sydney Informatics Hub, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), and the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) to deliver the Workflow Commons. We consult with the BioCommons bioinformatics workflows community to understand their ongoing challenges and identify gaps in existing community scale digital infrastructure.

Project timeline

January 2024 - December 2026

Project partners