The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Data Coordinating Center (DCC) has produced a set of high-quality analysis pipelines that are used by the ENCODE Consortium and have been released to the community. The pipelines are described with the Workflow Description Language (WDL) and use containerization to enhance reproducibility. To increase the usability and dissemination of these pipelines further we have developed a web interface on Truwl (https://truwl.com/) for specifying parameters and inputs for the ENCODE atac-seq pipeline. The pipeline can be executed directly from the web interface on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Once compute jobs are successfully executed, the analysis is posted back to Truwl to allow others to view the parameters, inputs, and outputs of previously executed pipelines. Automatically posting previously executed jobs provides increased transparency of computational experiments and provides examples for others to follow. All content on Truwl is open-access, web-searchable, and has unique identifiers making it easy to find and easy to share. In this software demonstration we will show the use of the atac-seq pipeline from Truwl by both specifying the parameters and inputs from the web interface individually and reusing a previously posted analysis.
Advances in high throughput sequencing have increased the need for tools that aid in data storage,
analysis, annotation, and visualization. Many such tools are available, but their usability and
accessibility vary. To make essential tools more accessible, the bioinformatics community has
coalesced around the idea of using cloud-based platforms to provide access to computational power
and data storage resources. CyVerse is a multi-institution project focused on supporting life science
research by providing user-friendly access to national cyberinfrastructure resources, including HPC
clusters and storage infrastructure. As part of this effort, CyVerse developers built the Terrain
Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), which offer programmatic access to these resources.
One important limitation of the CyVerse ecosystem, however, is that there is currently no easy way
for researchers to visualize genomic data sets stored in CyVerse accounts. This is problematic
because visualization is essential for all aspects of data analysis, from validating the output of
algorithms to detecting biologically meaningful patterns in data.
BioViz Connect solves this problem by connecting CyVerse resources to Integrated Genome
Browser, a full-featured, open source, visualization tool for genomics used by thousands of
researchers worldwide. BioViz Connect uses Terrain APIs to forward data from CyVerse into IGB.
The BioViz Connect interface (Figure 1) lets users annotate data files with key meta-data, notably
the version of reference genomes used in data analysis. Users can also run compute-intensive visual
analytics tasks and then display the results in IGB. To our knowledge, no other group has yet
experimented with using Terrain for application development outside of the CyVerse team.
Matúś Kalaš 1, Hervé Ménager 2, Alban Gaignard 3, Veit Schwämmle 4, Jon Ison 5, and the EDAM contributors and advisors
1. University of Bergen, Norway
2. Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
3. Univerity of Nantes, France
4. University of Southern Denmark, Ødense, Denmark
5. French Institute of Bioinformatics (ELIXIR France)
Project website: https://edamontology.org
Source code: https://github.com/edamontology/edamontology
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
EDAM is an ontology of well-established, familiar concepts that are prevalent within bioinformatics, and bioscientific data analysis in general [1,2]. The scope of EDAM includes types of data and data identifiers, data formats, operations, and topics. EDAM has a relatively simple structure, and comprises a set of concepts with terms, synonyms, definitions, relations, links, persistent identifiers, and some additional information (especially for data formats).
EDAM is developed in a participatory and transparent fashion, within a growing international community of contributors. The development of EDAM is coordinated with the development and curation of tools registries (e.g. bio.tools and BIII.eu); registries of training materials (e.g. TeSS); with packaging of open-source bioinformatics software (especially Debian Med [3]); the Common Workflow Language [4]; and other related communities and initiatives. These include the developers’ community of Galaxy [5], and collaborations with specialised networks of experts, such as within the development of EDAM-bioimaging [6]. EDAM-bioimaging is an extension of EDAM towards bioimage informatics and machine learning, where a broad group of experts in bioimaging, image analysis, and deep learning has been contributing to the common effort. The comprehensive but concise inclusion of machine learning topics is one of the new additions in 2020.The latest release of EDAM at the time of publication was version 1.24 [7], and EDAM-bioimaging version alpha06 [8].
In summary, EDAM functions as common controlled vocabulary when publishing, sharing, and integrating information about bioinformatics tools, workflows, training materials, and other resources. In addition, EDAM is also useful when choosing terminology, for data provenance, and in text mining (e.g. EDAMmap).
Poster published in F1000Research on 6 Jun 2020. https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1117983.1
Video presentation: https://youtu.be/Jq16bnq8kbk
