May 29: Knime, RapidMiner, Blog

Woke up this morning to an email from Heather saying that I had put the blog on the wrong site. Typical. I moved it over to this site, and edited the CSS a bit to make it look a bit nicer. And here we are. This is the new address – if you see this, you’re doing it right.

After my chat with Bertram yesterday, I’ve downloaded Knime. I ran one or two workflows on it – it has the standard dozen or so example workflows. It’s not as intuitive as the others, but it seems to work fine. What’s great about Knime is that there is an ability to access an external server with workflows on it – I like this, and am going to look into exactly how many workflows have been made and used on Knime.

I also ran into Rapidminer, which I saw had some workflows on myExperiment. I downloaded it and spent a while figuring out how to install it, finally did. It looks pretty good, as well. Again, standard example workflows. Both of these programs need a bit more work.

I’ve started up an excel sheet with all of the workflow systems I know of on it. So far I have 13, but I know that is going to grow quite a bit. Tomorrow I hope to look into Pegasus and some other ones I haven’t gotten to yet.

I also spent a bit of time this morning debating whether this project might go well at the Open Knowledge Foundation Conference in Berlin at the end of June/early July. What do you think? I want to go to see if I can make any contacts that would be able to help facilitate awareness of the necessity of public data, regarding workflows and methodology for scientists.

Finally, I emailed back David from myExperiment, who gave me a few papers and tips for places to look for information. I also combed this page and the wikipedia page for information about workflow systems, and gathered a few more .pdfs I’m going to download and upload to Mendeley tomorrow.

And I think that’s what I did today. A large part of it was spent moving from two cafรฉs that didn’t have reliable wireless to the library, sadly.