The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is an informal, multi-vendor working group consisting of various organizations and individuals that have an interest in portability of data analysis workflows. Our goal is to create specifications that enable data scientists to describe analysis tools and workflows that are powerful, easy to use, portable, and support reproducibility.

CWL builds on technologies such as JSON-LD and Avro for data modeling and Docker for portable runtime environments.

CWL is designed to express workflows for data-intensive science, such as Bioinformatics, Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy.

The current stable specification is draft 2:

http://common-workflow-language.github.io/draft-2/

The current work in progress specification is draft 3:

http://common-workflow-language.github.io/draft-3/

Implementations working on or currently capable of running the Common Workflow Language:

• Reference implementation (Python)
• Rabix
• Arvados
• Parallel Recipes

Github repository of example tools and workflows.

The CWL effort is on Github:

https://github.com/common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language

There is a Jenkins server maintained by Curoverse that runs tests for the reference implementation, builds and uploads packages, and builds and uploads Docker images:

https://ci.curoverse.com/job/common-workflow-language/

Current build status:

If you are interested in learning more or contributing ideas or code, come chat with us on Gitter, check out #CommonWL on Twitter, join the mailing list common-workflow-language on Google Groups or fork the repository and send a pull request!

• Curoverse
• Seven Bridges Genomics
• Galaxy Project
• Institut Pasteur
• University of California Davis
• Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
• Harvard Chan School of Public Health
• Broad Institute
• BioDatomics

• Peter Amstutz peter.amstutz@curoverse.com
• John Chilton jmchilton@gmail.com
• Michael R. Crusoe michael.crusoe@gmail.com
• John Kern kern3020@gmail.com
• Hervé Ménager herve.menager@gmail.com
• Maxim Mikheev mikhmv@biodatomics.com
• Tim Pierce twp@unchi.org
• Stian Soiland-Reyes soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk
• Luka Stojanovic luka.stojanovic@sbgenomics.com
• Nebojsa Tijanic nebojsa.tijanic@sbgenomics.com
• Sinisa Ivkovic sinisa.ivkovic@sbgenomics.com
• Robin Andeer robin.andeer@gmail.com
• Roman Valls Guimerà brainstorm@nopcode.org
• Guillermo Carrasco Hernandez guille.ch.88@gmail.com
• Brad Chapman bchapman@hsph.harvard.edu
• Josh Randall joshua.randall@sanger.ac.uk