Collaboration boosts Galaxy services
Top left: Laila Los delivering the VueJS workshop. Top right: A short history of the Galaxy Training Network presented by Dr Saskia Hiltemann. Middle left and centre: Brainstorming sessions were held indoors… and outdoors. Middle right: Dolphin spotting! Bottom: Dr Saskia Hiltemann and Dr Gareth Price co-delivering the ‘Managing hands-on training with Galaxy’ webinar.
The global Galaxy family has capitalised on the rare opportunity to work in the same timezone, with key members of the Galaxy Europe team remaining in Australia after attending the Galaxy Community Conference. Thanks to a working visit sponsored by ELIXIR Europe, significant progress has been made to improve the Galaxy experience.
Dr Björn Grüning, Freiburg Galaxy team lead, welcomed the opportunity to work intensively with the QCIF and Melbourne Bioinformatics based teams:
“The chance to collaborate across all aspects of Galaxy in person has been extremely valuable. We’ve prioritised strategic discussions and sharing best practices over writing code, and now we have strong roadmaps for several projects planned out for the rest of 2023.”
Targets for development
The wide-ranging areas for development identified by these collaborative discussions will be rolled across Galaxy over the next 6 months - you can see the list of priorities on GitHub.
User experience improvements including:
A user-friendly workflow discovery page - directly inspired by Prof Carolyn Hogg’s GCC2023 keynote speech
“Pinboards” offering quick and project-specific access to your favourite workflows, tools and training
Direct plug-in of Galaxy Training to the user interface, offering recorded training sessions just one click away from tools or workflows
Adding funding information to the metadata included with tools, allowing tool writers to acknowledge grants that support their work
Optimisation and large dataset testing on Galaxy Australia of workflows from the Vertebrate Genomes Project, including one click imports to the Galaxy Australia Genome Lab.
The team have found the simple act of working next to each other particularly helpful. Dr Anna Syme, Bioinformatician at Melbourne Bioinformatics and the Australian BioCommons, said that:
“The small day-to-day interactions that only happen in person have been a great chance to share our favourite tips and tricks when working with Galaxy. For example, Björn shared that user preferences can be set to re-use previous jobs rather than running them again, which has sped up the testing process of job-heavy workflows and saved me a lot of time!”
Presentations
During the visit, there have also been several formalised knowledge sharing sessions from both the Galaxy Europe and Galaxy Australia team.
Managing hands-on data analysis training with Galaxy webinar by Galaxy Australia’s Dr Gareth Price and Galaxy Training leads Dr Saskia Hiltemann and Helena Rasche (both from Erasmus Medical Center, the Netherlands)
A two day workshop on VueJS (the framework that Galaxy is built on) led by Laila Los, software engineer at The University of Freiburg
Dr Björn Grüning discussed the semi-automated Planemo toolkit for developing, deploying and executing tools and workflows in Galaxy at the August BioChats meeting, and in a half-day, hands-on workshop at the Melbourne Bioinformatics office.
Keep a close eye on Galaxy Australia for improvements, and hear more about the upcoming developments by subscribing to the BioCommons newsletter.