KNIME

KNIME (pronounced /naɪm/), the Konstanz Information Miner, is an open source data analytics, reporting and integration platform. KNIME integrates various components for machine learning and data mining through its modular data pipelining concept. A graphical user interface allows assembly of nodes for data preprocessing (ETL: Extraction, Transformation, Loading), for modeling and data analysis and visualization.

Since 2006, KNIME has been used in pharmaceutical research, but is also used in other areas like CRM customer data analysis, business intelligence and financial data analysis.

The Development of KNIME was started January 2004 by a team of software engineers at University of Konstanz as a proprietary product. The original developer team headed by Michael Berthold came from a company in the Silicon Valley providing software for the pharmaceutical industry. The initial goal was to create a modular, highly scalable and open data processing platform which allowed for the easy integration of different data loading, processing, transformation, analysis and visual exploration modules without the focus on any particular application area. The platform was intended to be a collaboration and research platform and should also serve as an integration platform for various other data analysis projects.

In 2006 the first version of KNIME was released and several pharmaceutical companies started using KNIME and a number of life science software vendors began integrating their tools into KNIME. Later that year, after an article in the German magazine c't, users from a number of other areas joined ship. As of 2012, KNIME is in use by over 15,000 actual users (i.e. not counting downloads but users regularly retrieving updates when they become available) not only in the life sciences but also at banks, publishers, car manufacturer, telcos, consulting firms, and various other industries but also at a large number of research groups worldwide.