I think I may have just found the answer to my question in this trello card https://trello.com/c/ndVQmt3G/1857-tools-should-be-able-to-generate-one-or-more-dataset-collections

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Aaron Petkau <aaron.petkau@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,

Does anyone know if it's possible to generate as output from a tool a dataset collection when it's input is only a single file?

I'm imagining a tool which takes as input a file containing a list of URLs for files outside of Galaxy and generates as output a dataset collection that can then be linked up to later tools.

Thanks,

Aaron