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SciWIn – Reproducible workflows made easy
Task Area 4 of FAIRagro develops and provides the central infrastructure services for the consortium. One of the four workpackages of TA 4 is Measure 4.4: Scientific Workflow Infrastructure (SciWIn). An essential part of this work package is the conception and development of the SciWIn Toolkit. On this page we explain what this is and what it involves.
Better, easier, more beautiful work … what stressed researcher wouldn’t want that?
SciWIn (Scientific Workflow Infrastructure) is a lightweight toolkit developed within the FAIRagro project to support researchers in creating, executing, documenting and sharing computational workflows in their everyday work. The goal is to help researchers move from collections of scripts that “work on my machine” to reproducible workflows that can be executed locally, shared with colleagues, or scaled to run on HPC environments without requiring expertise in workflow languages such as CWL, Nextflow, or Snakemake.
SciWIn-Client (s4n)
For researchers who work on the command line
The SciWIn-Client is a command-line tool (s4n) designed to simplify the creation, recording, annotation, and execution of computational workflows. Workflows are generated directly from existing scripts or command-line tools.
Users can prefix their usual commands with s4n create to automatically generate a CWL CommandLineTool. Using Git in the background, SciWIn-Client automatically tracks outputs and records the workflow history and provenance.
SciWIn-Client (s4n) is ideal for:
- Researchers who work with scripts and shell commands and want to create CWL CommandLineTools
- Researchers who want to document their work and version it
- Anyone aiming for reproducibility across machines or teams
SciWIn-Studio
For researchers who prefer a graphical interface
SciWIn-Studio is a simple graphical user interface that enables users to create workflows visually by connecting workflow steps and installing existing tools. This makes it ideal for less technical users, as no coding is required. At the same time, users can generate new workflow steps (CWL CommandLineTools) from existing scripts within SciWIn-Studio and execute them directly.
Features of SciWIn-Studio:
- Drag-and-drop interface for connecting workflow steps
- Visualize workflow steps and show the data flow
- Execute workflows locally or remotely
- Ideal for users who don’t work on the command-line
Get involved: for more information, read the documentation to get started, watch our video from the respective FAIRagro-Talk (more information: see below) , let us know if you have already tried SciWIn as a FAIRagro service (download from GitHub) or share your ideas and feedback with us in the form of a GitHub issue.
If you would like to know more, please contact Harald von Waldow.
FAIRagro Talk: SciWIn – making your workflows work for you
Working better, easier, more beautifully… what stressed researcher wouldn’t want that?
In Task Area 4 of FAIRagro, the central infrastructure services for the consortium are being developed and provided – including the Scientific Workflow Infrastructure (SciWIn). In the November edition of FAIRagro Talks, Jens Krumsieck (Thünen Institute) explained what this is and what advantages it brings.
