Welcome to the Philog Project

Philog is a domain-specific language (DSL) and computing framework for use by evolutionary biologists working in phylogenetics. It is currently in heavy development.

Currently, biologists must do a large amount of their work themselves - they must obtain data and send it to individual programs (like CLUSTAL W and PAUP), take the result and feed it to another program, etc. Oftentimes, the different programs do not use the same formats, so the biologist must manually convert the data between the formats of the tools they're using. Overall, this process is slow, tedious, and error-prone.

Philog is meant to solve this problem. The language will allow biologists to intuitively specify an experiment workflow (the locations of desired data and the operations to perform on that data). The system will take that workflow, interface with the required software, automatically convert between data formats, perform the desired operations, and return the result.

Project Goals

• Write software to automatically convert betwen desired data formats
• Develop a DSL that allows biologists to specify workflows in an intuitive manner
• Develop a software system to execute programs written in the DSL, automatically talking to the required programs and converting between data formats as necessary

Internal Links

• Phylogenetic Software
• Lessons Learned from Parsing the NEXUS Format