Galaxy

Galaxy is an open-source platform used for many types of computational analyses in biomedical data. Originally developed for the genomic field, Galaxy provides today tools for many other disciplines in the life sciences. Galaxy main goal is to support researches in many different biosciences fields, always aiming for:

1. Accessibility, so any user can run analyses without any programming knowledge
2. Reproducibility, to enable users to repeat and understand others' analyses
3. Transparency, encouraging users interaction

To conform with these ambitions, the Galaxy platform counts with a good documentation in the project wiki. It also hold a participative community from many places around the world and with many fields of interest.

A regular user, for example, with no particular computer skills, is apt to realize data analyses in one of the existing instances. For them, Galaxy is very intuitive and the documentation is quite useful. One can start loading its own dataset from the computer or even importing data from known webservers as UCSC and ENA. A series of analyze tools can be easily found and ran. The available tools will vary from instance to instance. The tools may be combined in workflows thanks to a graphical interface. Datasets and workflows can be shared and published through data libraries, histories and pages.

A free public server is kept by the Galaxy team, but many other instances are also available. Any organization or user can deploy their own Galaxy instance adapted for their particular needs. They can also develop and publish their own tools, which may also be useful for other users that are then able to easily install the tool in their Galaxy instance. Developpers are encouraged to appropriately document their tools, since other users might want to use it.

Galaxy's flexibility and core values are strong enough reasons for making it ARTbio's choice