Users, administrators and developers of the Galaxy platform gathered this week in Norwich, UK, for the Galaxy Community Conference 2015. The goal was to present and share best practices in using Galaxy, exchange experience and discuss latest developments.
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| ELIXIR stand at the Galaxy Conference, with Rita Hendricusdottir, the ELIXIR Training Coordinator and Frederik Coppens, ELIXIR Belgium. |
Part of the programme was an ELIXIR-Galaxy workshop organised on Tuesday 7 July 2015, attended by around 50 participants. They were introduced to ELIXIR, and presented preliminary results of the online survey among Galaxy users organised by ELIXIR. They then discussed what are the biggest challenges in using and sustaining the Galaxy platform and how ELIXIR can support the Galaxy users across Europe.
Recurring theme of the discussion was creating a European community of Galaxy users, that would draw on strengths and experiences of the national Galaxy communities, and provide a forum for information exchange and collaboration in Europe and beyond. Other topics brought up in the discussion inlcuded the need for systematic Galaxy trainig or integration of Galaxy resources into the ELIXIR service registry.
The results of the survey and the input from the ELIXIR-Galaxy workshop will feed into a set of recommendations to the ELIXIR Heads of Node.
Galaxy across ELIXIR Nodes
Galaxy is a well-established open source web platform for data analysis in bioinformatics. The Galaxy workflow system is extensively used as part of national infrastructure in several Nodes, ELIXIR has set up a Galaxy Working Group to evaluate the usage of Galaxy in the Nodes and its applications in ELIXIR platforms. The ELIXIR workshop at the Galaxy Conference is the first outcome of the working group.