Hello everyone,

Greetings!

I am a contributor to the Galaxy project and currently working on finding similarities in Galaxy tools (a part of my master's thesis). This work aims at finding similar tools for any Galaxy tool based on tools description and their input/output file types.

For example, the similar tools for a tool "bowtie2" could be "bwa", "bwameth" or "bwa_mem" among others.

To see the results of this project online, please visit the link (works fine on Firefox and Chrome). You should wait for a few seconds before you see a list of tools in the select list as the page loads a big JSON file (~100MB) asynchronously. Once the tools are loaded, please choose a tool and see the similar ones for your favorite tool(s). The similar tools are arranged in the descending order of their probability scores (top 20 are shown). The similar tools that you see are a mixture of tools extracted based on the selected tool's description and file types. It means that sometimes the tools are similar due to their description/kind of functions they have and sometimes due to their file types. Also, there are a few graphics/plots at the end of the page.

Here is the code repository to read more about this project.

I have followed the following approach to compute the similar tools:

1. Text mining to collect and preprocess the tools' keywords (which represent a tool) - BM25
   
2. Matrix factorization to extract important concepts (and not just words) - Latent Semantic Analysis
   
3. Optimization to combine probability distributions - Gradient Descent and Backtracking Line Search
   

Further, I have plans to include:

• Deep learning approach to compute similarity between paragraphs inspired from this work
  
• Similarity in workflows

If you have any comment/feedback, please write. It will be immensely helpful.

Thanks a lot!