Galaxy External Display Applications: Closing a dataflow interoperability loop

Interoperability of datasets, tools, and resources is essential to modern scientific investigation and analysis. The necessity to gather disparate datasets together, perform analysis with a collection of discrete tools, and visualize the results remains a standard approach for exploring and making sense across scientific research domains. Here, we describe the Galaxy External Display Application (GEDA) framework which provides researchers with the ability to facilitate the interoperability of Galaxy user data and external resources, while promoting findability, accessibility, and reuse. The only requirement on the external resource for GEDA accessibility is that it is able to accept a parameter value that contains a URL pointing to user data.