# Common Workflow Language explained in 64 seconds

In many scientific fields (such as bioinformatics, medical imaging, and astronomy) large quantities of data need to be analyzed.

This can involve large-scale and repetitive processes in long pipelines of different tools — referred to as workflows.

it can be very time-consuming to run the data through all these different tools by hand and convert outputs to various formats to make them compatible with the next step.

Workflow management systems are designed to alleviate this problem by allowing these workflows to be expressed formally and providing infrastructure to set up, execute, and monitor them.

This formal expression of workflows allows for scientists to easily share and reuse them.

Crucially they can also be used to verify results of computation for published work.

However there are many competing \[ways\] for describing workflows which is a barrier to this aim.

Currently there are over a hundred different data analysis workflow systems with no interoperability between them.

The need has arisen to have a single common standard and so the "Common Workflow Language" project was created: An open standard designed to express workflows and their tooling in groups of YAML structured text files.

http://www.commonwl.org http://www.commonwl.org/v1.0/UserGuide.html https://bcbio-nextgen.readthedocs.io https://view.commonwl.org/workflows/github.com/common-workflow-language/workflows/tree/920c6be/workflows/lobSTR/lobSTR-workflow.cwl…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2017
- Runtime: 1 min
- By: Common Workflow Language
- Genres: Science
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Common_Workflow_Language_explained_in_64_seconds.webm)
- Licence or status: [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Common Workflow Language
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/61310395?play=1)