As public health bioinformatic workflows become increasingly complicated, efforts are needed to promote sensible standardization, portability and reproducibility of assays and workflows across a range of environments, contexts and resource conditions. Well integrated visualization and reporting tools are critical to convey actionable information to a range of stakeholders and decision-makers across multidisciplinary public health teams.

The Bioinformatics, Pipelines and Data Visualizations Working Group focuses on the establishment of standards and best practices for bioinformatic pipeline development, workflow templating and management, packaging and containerization, code and documentation standards and strategies for support.  The Working Group activities overlap with other Working Groups such as Data Structures, Infrastructure and; Ethics and Data sharing in that they have a unified goal of an open, interoperable and accessible informatics ecosystem.

Currently, focus is on a landscape review of how other sectors have approached software standards and reproducibility. Building upon this information, the workgroup will develop consensus recommendations on code development and documentation standards, architectural best practices and reference implementations, critical gaps and requirements in public health bioinformatics software development, sustainability and improved access.