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Re: [science-iwg] OpenChrom - KNIME

Congrats on the grant!

I'm not that familiar with KNIME, but the GPL license is problematic.

At a glance, it looks like KNIME has a much larger user base than Triquetrum/Ptolemy, so they must be doing something right. :-)

It looks like KNIME might have just one model of computation and it might only support directed acyclic graphs.  Ptolemy II is a laboratory for experimenting with models of computation and modeling and supports loops, hierarchy and mutable graphs via higher order functions.   The wiki page for KNIME indicates that it has been used for large data sets, which is something that Ptolemy II does not have as much experience with.  At this point, in the Eclipse-world KNIME is far more mature and useful than Triquetrum.

    * KNIME offers no support to control hardware devices - Triquetrum/Ptolemy does, am I right?
Yes. Our current work with Ptolemy is around Accessors, which are actor proxies for sensors, services and actuators.  We have a Ptolemy configuration called Cape Code for this work.  One of my goals is to create a similar configuration in Triquetrum.  We have done other work with physical systems.  KNIME could probably be made to control hardware devices as well.
    * KNIME has a rich workflow editor, which possibly could be re-used by Triquetrum/Ptolemy.
If the license problem was removed, then it would be worth looking in to.  Erwin has been working on the Triquetrum block diagram editor, so he would have a more accurate opinion.

It turns out that creating a block diagram editor is easy.  The first 80% can be done very quickly.  Then it gets harder and harder.  There is quite a bit to the Ptolemy block diagram editor, implemented in Swing.  For example, we support actor-oriented classes, where a model can be seen as a sort of base class that can be extended by other models.  Handling this graphically requires a certain amount of effort.  There are also a number of models where the location of the actors in the block diagram editor represent the physical location of objects and can be animated.  Neither of these are strict requirements for a tool, but they are the sort of thing that can be nice to have.

_Christopher




On 3/3/17 1:30 AM, Philip Wenig wrote:
Howdy,

as mentioned earlier, we luckily received a grant to combine KNIME and OpenChrom.

https://www.knime.org

Since Wednesday, Martin Horn from KNIME and I hacked a while to combine both tools. Good news - it works well, see attached screenshot. We are able to run in both modi:

OpenChrom inside of KNIME
KNIME inside of OpenChrom (screenshot)

Is this also interesting for other projects?

Sure, KNIME has some functionality in common with Triquetrum/Ptolemy. But there are also some differences, as far as I understand:

    * KNIME offers no support to control hardware devices - Triquetrum/Ptolemy does, am I right?
    * KNIME has a rich workflow editor, which possibly could be re-used by Triquetrum/Ptolemy.

Currently, KNIME is licensed  under the GPL.
I'd really appreciate if they would switch to EPL or even better, become a member of the Eclipse Science TLP.

@Matt:
DAWNSci was licensed in its early days under GPL too.
Could you make some statements why Diamond Light Source eventually chose EPL instead?


Best,
Philip 



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-- 
Christopher Brooks, PMP
Academic Program Manager
iCyPhy/Ptolemy/TerraSwarm
University of California, Berkeley
707.332.0670, cxh@xxxxxxxxxxxx, https://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cxh

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