Using bio.tools to generate and annotate workbench tool descriptions
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Updated: Feb 15, 2026

Volume Segmentation and Analysis of Biological Materials Using SuRVoS Super-region Volume Segmentation Workbench
Published on: August 23, 2017
Kenzo-Hugo Hillion1, Ivan Kuzmin2, Anton Khodak3
1Bioinformatics and Biostatistics HUB, Centre de Bioinformatique, Biostatistique et Biologie Intégrative (C3BI, USR 3756 Institut Pasteur et CNRS), Paris, France.
Abstract:
Workbench and workflow systems such as Galaxy, Taverna, Chipster, or Common Workflow Language (CWL)-based frameworks, facilitate the access to bioinformatics tools in a user-friendly, scalable and reproducible way. Still, the integration of tools in such environments remains a cumbersome, time consuming and error-prone process. A major consequence is the incomplete or outdated description of tools that are often missing important information, including parameters and metadata such as publication or links to documentation. ToolDog (Tool DescriptiOn Generator) facilitates the integration of tools - which have been registered in the ELIXIR tools registry (https://bio.tools) - into workbench environments by generating tool description templates. ToolDog includes two modules. The first module analyses the source code of the bioinformatics software with language-specific plugins, and generates a skeleton for a Galaxy XML or CWL tool description. The second module is dedicated to the enrichment of the generated tool description, using metadata provided by bio.tools. This last module can also be used on its own to complete or correct existing tool descriptions with missing metadata.
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