Hi Galaxy team,
The following is just a bunch of thoughts after using Galaxy for a while and which might be interesting for future developments...
1. Interface consistency: "Save"
* There are three nice icons at the top of all my dataset items in the history panel on the right for view, edit and delete. So why is there no save icon at the same location instead of a link further down? * When I edit a workflow there is a save button above the canvas and there is another on in the panel on the right when I edit the properties of a specific workflow item. As far as I can tell these buttons are not completely redundant, but why do I need two save buttons?
2. Provenance data
* Reproducibility is important and it is nice that Galaxy automatically captures your analysis in histories, but if I want to have a second look at my data after let's say a few months to figure out what I did exactly and how a certain combination of data and tools produced a certain result. Hence if I for example executed a workflow once every two weeks on updated data for many months I might want to retrieve the history for a certain version of a database. So I might want to say give me the histories containing datasets tagged as Ensembl version 48, or UniProt 3 or some version of a reference assembly, etc. Or I might want to see how the results changed for a certain gene over time as result of updated databases and /or tools. So I might want to say to Galaxy show me all histories containing ENSGALG000012589 or NM_45689725. Hence, I'd love to be able to search histories. In addition to make it a bit easier to trace thing in browse mode it would be nice if the date a history was last modified would be visible. Currently I only have the age of the history in minutes, hours or days. That is convenient for recent items, but for things that are longer ago a date makes more sense to me....
* There is a fixed "Database/Build" popup that I can use to tag my data sets, but this feels artificially limited. Is there any reason why the species and database version cannot be separate items? If there would be a popup first to select a species followed by a second popup to select the genome assembly version, the lists could be a lot smaller and hence easier to navigate. In addition there are cases where I do have a species, but don't have an assembly or where there are additional version numbers to keep track of. For example I have lots of Ensembl data. Ensembl does not have a single version number, but 3 version numbers. There is one for the database schema, one for the assembly and one for the annotation/ genebuild. The curent version for mouse is for example: 55 37 h, where 55 is the release and schema version number, 37 the assembly and "h" the version of the gene build. In addition I recently moved to a proteomics group and might want to capture DB version numbers for species without a reference assembly. for example I might know the species name and the fact I'm using UniProt 15.5... but currently I cannot easily capture that in a consistent way. (I know I might add this to the "info" for a dataset, but it's free text, with all kinds of possible spelling variants as a result...)
Cheers,
Pi
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