Give your tool or workflow an informative name

An ideal name will make your software recognisable, its function understandable, and make the software easy to find using a search engine.

How?

Make sure that the name for your tool or workflow has at least some of the following features.

Short & Human readable

6 - 15 characters. Shorter names are easy to search, remember, write and can increase name recognition.

Unique & searchable

Make sure the name is easy for a search engine to find. Don’t pick a common or popular name that means something else: if the name doesn’t clash with other findable things, it can be found immediately when searching, or it will be at the top of the search engine result.

Informative

If possible, the name can explain what the tool or workflow does. Good examples are BEDTools (Quinlan & Hall, 2010) and SAMtools (Li et al., 2009), as the names mention the data formats used (BED, SAM) and suggest that the software encompasses many tools.

Avoid prefixes e.g. bio

Don’t use a prefix like bio in the name if it could be reused outside of the biosciences domain. The same applies for geo, astro, eco etc. You will notice that some popular tools and platforms are exceptions to this rule (e.g. bio.tools (Ison et al., 2019)).

Use ASCII

Computers and search engines don’t like complex characters and white spaces: use the ASCII standard. The key reason to avoid complex characters is that they create issues for findability if a software registry doesn’t process these characters properly or if the name is challenging for a user to type.

Examples

Great software name examples include WorkflowHub, FASTQC and HiFiAdapterFilt. Each name is short, unique, searchable, and provides information about the software while avoiding both the bio prefix and complex characters.

References

1. Quinlan, A. R., & Hall, I. M. (2010). BEDTools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic features. Bioinformatics, 26(6), 841–842. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq033
2. Li, H., Handsaker, B., Wysoker, A., Fennell, T., Ruan, J., Homer, N., Marth, G., Abecasis, G., Durbin, R., & 1000 Genome Project Data Processing Subgroup. (2009). The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools. Bioinformatics, 25(16), 2078–2079. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btp352
3. Ison, J., Ienasescu, H., Chmura, P., Rydza, E., Ménager, H., Kalaš, M., Schwämmle, V., Grüning, B., Beard, N., Lopez, R., Duvaud, S., Stockinger, H., Persson, B., Vařeková, R. S., Raček, T., Vondrášek, J., Peterson, H., Salumets, A., Jonassen, I., … Brunak, S. (2019). The bio.tools registry of software tools and data resources for the life sciences. Genome Biology, 20(1), 164. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1772-6

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