Functionality
Galaxy is a scientific workflow system. These systems provide a means to build multi-step computational analyses akin to a recipe. They typically provide a graphical user interface for specifying what data to operate on, what steps to take, and what order to do them in.
Galaxy is also a data integration platform for biological data. It supports data uploads from the user's computer, by URL, and from many online resources (such as the UCSC Genome Browser, BioMart and InterMine).
Galaxy supports a range of widely used biological data formats, and translation between those formats. Galaxy provides a web interface to many text manipulation utilities, enabling researchers to do their own custom reformatting and manipulation without having to do any programming.
Galaxy includes interval manipulation utilities for doing set theoretic operations (e.g. intersection, union, ...) on intervals. Many biological file formats include genomic interval data (a frame of reference, e.g., chromosome or contig name, and start and stop positions), allowing these data to be integrated.
Finally, Galaxy also supports data and analysis persistence and publishing. See Reproducibility and Transparency below.
Read more about this topic: Galaxy (computational Biology)