The Edge Software Consultancy

Nodes4Knime

The Edge launch nodes4knime developing open source nodes for the Knime project

February 11th, 2008 — The Edge launch a set of free to use cheminformatics nodes for Knime based on ChemAxon cheminformatics components.

See the source forge project for details: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nodes4knime/

The project will develop a set of free to use (under the terms of the GNU public License) nodes for the Knime open source data mining and workflow tool. Andrew Lemon, Principal Chemistry Consultant said, "We're pleased to support the Knime project and believe that by developing open source nodes with real commercial applications we can help to promote Knime to a wider audience. Knime is another example of the Open source business model delivering value to the pharmaceutical industry. This activity was supported by several of our customers and demonstrates our commitment to keeping science open and leveraging our knowledge and experience."

Building from basic support for I/O of cheminformatics data, together with drawing and visualisation of chemical structures, we hope to initiate community development of more nodes generating a useful resource for Knime users in academic groups and the pharmaceutical industry alike.

	The Chemical Sketcher allows chemists to input chemical structures into an active workflow
	The Ligand Viewer supports visualisation of structures within a workflow.
	The Chemical File Reader node supports input of cheminformatics data from a variety of formats.
The Ligand Viewer can be used to visualise the results of docking calculations using Marvin Space.

Please note that the cheminformatics nodes are designed for those who already have free access to the non-open source libraries from Chemaxon.

The next set of nodes use a SOA (service orientated approach) to submit computational tasks to a distributed compute server. This will be used to provide computational services such as Virtual screening from the Knime environment. The whole stack will be open source providing a quick and easy model to integrate a variety of in-house, academic and commercial applications.

If you would like to like to contribute to the nodes4knime project contact us or just download and enjoy on the source forge project.