Bridging Galaxy and Geospatial Standards: Enabling Interoperable VRE Workflows for Earth System Science

During the FAIR-EASE project, which aims to deliver integrated and FAIR-compliant services for Earth and environmental sciences, a key challenge emerged: enabling interoperable and transparent data processing across disciplines and Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Earth system science increasingly relies on complex workflows combining heterogeneous data, models, and tools that often remain confined within  technical silos and domain-specific environments, limiting cross-disciplinary reuse and collaboration.

Galaxy, a widely adopted open-source platform for FAIR data analysis, plays a central role within FAIR-EASE. It provides strong capabilities for sharing, executing, and reproducing scientific workflows. However, while it excels at sharing and executing scientific processes,Galaxy remains difficult to integrate into the broader geospatial ecosystem. Its native API is not aligned with the standards commonly used by geospatial and Earth Observation communities, creating a significant barrier to interoperability with external tools and platforms.

This limitation directly affects the "I" in FAIR (Interoperability) when connecting Galaxy-based VREs to other environments. While the geospatial community, primarily relies on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards—such as Web Processing Service (WPS) and OGC API Processes—or on community-driven standards like OpenEO, Galaxy exposes its processing through a specific API that is not natively understood outside its ecosystem.  As a result, Galaxy workflows, although FAIR within their own environment, remain partially isolated from standard-based geospatial infrastructures.

To address this gap, Geomatys focused during the FAIR-EASE project on enabling Galaxy workflows to be exposed through widely adopted geospatial standards used by the entire community. Our approach relies on the open-source geospatial platform Examind Community, which acts as a standards-compliant gateway between Galaxy and external clients. By mapping Galaxy workflows to OGC API Processes and WPS, users can discover, configure, and execute Galaxy workflows using widely familiar and widely used geospatial interfaces. This interoperability layer was subsequently extended to support the OpenEO standard, enabling Earth Observation users to access Galaxy workflows through an API increasingly adopted across EO (Earth Observation) community.

To further simplify this ecosystem, we initiated the development of a lightweight bridge based on FastAPI (Python). This micro-service provides a transparent translation layer between the Galaxy API and the OGC Processes or OpenEO APIs. Designed to be modular and easy-to-deploy, it offers a pragmatic solution for institutions wishing to expose their Galaxy instances to the geospatial ecosystem without the overhead of a full-scale infrastructure. 

By normalizing access to Galaxy workflows through standard interfaces, FAIR-EASE demonstrates how VRE-powered access can be achieved in practice. This work significantly broadens the user community of Galaxy and enables researchers to integrate Galaxy-based processing into external tools and workflows. This concrete solution demonstrates how "VRE-powered access" can be achieved by leveraging existing standards to eliminate technical barriers, and our experience highlights that advancing interoperable Earth system science does not require creating new platforms but rather building robust bridges between mature existing tools, such as Galaxy, and the ecosystem of existing geospatial standards.