#Usegalaxy Lights up Northern Skies

Gigaohm blog presents a nice discussion of Galaxy conference in Oslo that the readers will enjoy.

Galaxy shines in the land of the midnight sun

Immediately after beer, mussels and genomics at ICG-Europe in Ghent (see BGIs write-up of the event), last week was a blur of eye-wateringly expensive alcohol, brown cheese and reproducible research at the Galaxy Community Conference in Oslo. Now in its 4th year, and the second year we have attended (see the blog and Genome Biology meeting report from last years meeting in Chicago), GCC 2013 was bigger and better than ever. Tripling in size since the first meeting, the over 200 attendees took part in a full day of training followed by a packed two days of talks on reproducible research, and updates from Galaxy users and the core Galaxy team.

The goals of Galaxy in democratizing computational research and making it more reproducible align very closely with ours at GigaScience. While the Galaxy team were keen to stress that Galaxy is much more than a workflow management system, weve been using our GigaGalaxy data analysis platform to present workflows associated with our papers, allowing them to be shared, tested and more easily reproduced. We presented a poster at the conference showing an example of how this works for the SOAPdenovo2 genome assembler paper we published, and if you were werent in Oslo you can see the poster here as well as see the tutorial on our GigaGalaxy server.

This years meeting was a great opportunity to see how far things have come in the decade that Galaxy has morphed and grown from the perl-based GALA platform, and everyone was very excited by the growth in number of users of the platform with 36,000 current users being supplemented by 1,300 new converts a month.

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