If confirmed as a galaxy, the system would be the faintest galaxy ever discovered — and may suggest that many others remain to be discovered.

The tools presented above are all used in various areas of the life sciences, but their main task is the orchestration of external tools that exchange files with each other. Natively, KNIME goes a different way by encouraging a deep tool integration that is compatible with KNIME's table format. With this approach data are embedded into table cells allowing for easy tool interoperability without the need for file conversions.

Orchestrating the execution of many command line tools is a task for Galaxy, while an analysis of life science data with subsequent statistical analysis and visualization is best carried out in KNIME or Orange. Orange with its “ad-hoc” execution of nodes caters to scientists doing quick analyses on small amounts of data, while KNIME is built from the ground up for large tables and images. Noteworthy is that none of the mentioned tools provide image processing capabilities as extensive as those of the KNIME Image Processing plugin (KNIP).

Compared to other tools KNIME focuses on a deeper integration of tools and tries to manage the data that flows in the workflow by itself. Tools like Galaxy and Taverna, on the other hand, rather orchestrate command line tools that exchange files. Orange is very similar to KNIME in that it has extensive machine learning capabilities, but focuses more on the analysis of smaller data sets. We conclude that there are workflow tools for a variety of different use cases and that it is the scientists task to choose the tool that fits the problem at hand best. While there are certainly overlaps, each tool excels at its intended purpose.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

http://galaxy.cbiit.cuhk.edu.hk/