Software review: the KNIME workflow environment and its applications in genetic programming and machine learning

Abstract

Software comes in various forms, from the hair shirt style of the command line to fully blown, GUI-based commercial offerings. The former tends to give its users more control, but disenfranchises many other potential users who cannot themselves program yet who might otherwise benefit from it. A kind of halfway house is represented by software environments that provide both flexibility (power) and ease of use. A particular subset is represented by Workflow environments, in which loosely coupled, individual processing nodes can be ?bolted together? to permit complex computational operations. Taverna [7] (http://?www.?taverna.?org.?uk/?) is a very well known scientific workflow system, especially in bioinformatics. It is a fully open environment, freely available, and workflows can be shared via its sister site myExperiment http://?www.?myexperiment.?org/?. It has some extensions for cheminformatics [2]. A particular strength is the means by which it can use Web services to link federated Web-based resources, a particular feature of bioinformatics.