Common Workflow Language

The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is a community-developed specification for interoperable scientific workflows, supported by multiple workflow engine vendors and open source projects. Started as a third-year project at The University of Manager and further developed as part of the BioExcel project, the CWL Viewer is available to visualize any CWL workflow definitions, show their annotations and composition.

The public CWL Viewer instance has become the de facto standard web visualization tool for workflows within the larger CWL community – the list of known workflows shows more than 2000 individual workflows have been visualized.

In 2017 the CWL Viewer was presented at the ISMB/ECCB conference where it won the F1000 Best Poster Award. The development and hosting of CWL Viewer is now being transitioned to Curii Corporation, an industry partner in the CWL project that is developing the Arvados platform.

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