→ Slides doi:10.7490/f1000research.1112466.1
→ Video
AuthorsMarius van den Beek, Daniel Blankenberg, Dave Bouvier, John Chilton, Peter Cock, Nate Coraor, Björn Grüning, Youri Hoogstrate, James Johnson, Greg von Kuster, Eric Rasche and Nicola Soranzo
AbstractGalaxy provides abstractions to make it easy to integrate tools, so virtually any tool that can be run from the command line can be integrated into Galaxy. The ability to seamlessly integrate tools into Galaxy spawned a large community of Galaxy tool developers, with the
Galaxy Tool Shed as a distrubtion platform for installation into any Galaxy instance. This proliferation of tools resulted in the need for an oversight committee to set standards, define best practices, and vet tools for the Galaxy community. In 2012, the Intergalactic Utilities Commission (IUC) was founded as an organized body to provide these services, and has developed
best-practice guidelines for tool development. These standards are a continual work-in-progress as new technologies are introduced into the Galaxy environment.
We will highlight IUC achievements over the past year, including enhanced reproducible installations via Starforge and cargo-port, new dependency resolution systems like Conda, and various enhancements to Galaxy tool syntax that enable more powerful and user-friendly tools. We’ll introduce new processes that have enhanced Galaxy tool development, testing and maintenance using Planemo and Conda, with details about how these applications can be used as complementary components to Galaxy and the Galaxy Tool Shed.
Important goals of the IUC are to continue to grow not only the community, but also the committee itself so that we can provide the friendly oversight benefits to every Galaxy Tool developer that is interested. This past year the IUC has welcomed 3 new members and organised 3 Codefests. We welcome others that have an interest in joining this committee and work with us.
