Top 3 KNIME Community Extensions 2023

What would KNIME Analytics Platform be without its community extensions? Upon initial download, KNIME Analytics Platform is available with core functionality, but additional features can easily be added by installing extensions. Extensions are generally topic centered, like the KNIME Text Processing extension or the KNIME Keras integration. They can either be native, i.e., developed by KNIME, or written by trusted community partners. To date, the KNIME Community Hub features 53 community extensions and counting. 

With the end of 2023 approaching, we thought what better time for a retrospective on community extensions available via the KNIME Community Hub? We evaluated the extensions to see which ones stand out from the rest based on these criteria:

• Long-standing in operation. The winner extension cannot be the last kid on the block. It must be publicly available for at least one year.
• Active support. The extension must come with active support on the KNIME Forum. The developers should actively assist users of the extension in resolving questions related to available nodes and features.
• Active maintenance. The extension must be promptly updated to be compatible with each new version of KNIME Analytics Platform. This is of course a demanding task, since at least two new major versions of KNIME Analytics Platform are released each year.
• Audience size. A straightforward measure for a successful software extension is its number of users.
• Openness. All the extensions considered for this ranking must be open source and released free of charge for all KNIME users.

If you are a frequent KNIME user and are already familiar with some of the many KNIME Community extensions available, based on the above criteria maybe you can already guess who the winners are?

Without further ado, the awards go to…

The first position in this award ranking belongs to the Vernalis KNIME Nodes extension. This is the absolute most downloaded and used extension developed by the KNIME Community, well-supported on the KNIME forum and up-to-date at every KNIME Analytics Platform release. It has also been around for quite a few years now, allowing cheminformaticians and standard KNIME users alike to extend their usage of KNIME Analytics Platform with new functions. 

It is a very rich extension, with more than 150 nodes for SMILES manipulation, flow control, fingerprints and much more. Originally developed to help cheminformaticians within the KNIME community with their daily work, it soon transcended its niche audience. 

Indeed, besides the strictly cheminformatics related nodes, many of this extension’s nodes are of general usage: loop nodes, switch nodes, database nodes, data transformation nodes, distance calculation nodes, file utility nodes, and of course data visualization nodes. It’s for good reason that this extension is widely used within the community. Did you know that the first loop node with multiple input and output ports in KNIME Analytics Platform came from the Vernalis extension?

Figure 1.The Vernalis KNIME Nodes extension on the KNIME Community Hub.

Vernalis Research is the world leader in fragment and structure-based drug discovery. Based in Cambridge (UK), the company develops and applies fragment and structure-based methods to solve problems in drug discovery and has generated cell active lead compounds and development candidates against targets in oncology, neurodegeneration, anti-infectives and inflammation.

Behind the development of this successful extension is Stephen Roughley, already a KNIME COTM awardee in January 2023 and included in the KNIME Hall of Fame.

In the second position, we find the Lhasa public plugin extension. This is the second most downloaded extension. It is also well supported on the KNIME Forum, and very promptly updated for every KNIME Analytics Platform release  since its creation.  

A relatively small extension, with just 10 nodes, and yet very popular within the KNIME Community, it provides useful functionalities for model building and table manipulation, like performance scorer and table transformation nodes. You’ll find these nodes tend to find their way into quite a few workflows across the KNIME Community Hub.

Figure 2.The Lhasa public plugin extension on the KNIME Hub.

Lhasa Limited is based in Leeds (UK) and creates software to support decision making on chemical safety. It develops world-class scientific software solutions that align with member and regulatory expectations. Lhasa’s technology is designed by scientists, for scientists, in collaboration with industry stakeholders and regulators.

Did you know that Lhasa Limited is the author of two other very interesting extensions? These are the Lhasa reaction contributions and Lhasa Metabolism Feature.  Both extensions are life sciences related. The first extension provides reaction node development including wrappers for third party tools like RDT and RInChI, while the second extension contains a number of plugins relating to SmartCyp and WhichCyp predictions for metabolism.

We would like to thank Samuel Webb, the man behind the “Lhasa public plugin” extension.

The RDKit Nodes Feature extension occupies the third position in this ranking. The RDKit extension has also been popular, well supported on the KNIME Forum, and promptly updated for every KNIME Analytics Platform release.  

Another life science extension dedicated to the cheminformaticians within the KNIME Community, the extension provides, amongst others, functionality for 2D and 3D molecular operations, and descriptors and fingerprint generation that serve as input for machine learning The chemistry data types this extension adds in the backend are also used in the Vernalis nodes.

Figure 3.The RDKit Nodes Feature extension on the KNIME Community Hub.

RDKit is an open-source software for cheminformatics toolkit written in C++, that is also usable from Java or Python - its Python library is particularly well known.

The man behind the RDKit Nodes Feature extension is Manuel Schwarze. He is the developer wrapping the RDKit functionalities in KNIME nodes and sharing them on the KNIME Community Hub. 

Did you know that RDKit also offers a wizard tool, called the RDKit Nodes Creation Wizards Feature, specifically for KNIME developers? After installing this feature into the Eclipse SDK, developers have a wizard available to auto-generate 95% of the code when writing new RDKit nodes. The RDKit Nodes Wizard supports the generation of different types of nodes: Modifier, Calculator, Splitter, Filter as well as combinations of them. 

Our deepest thanks go to the developer teams and to the companies behind them for expanding the KNIME Analytics Platform core to include more specialized areas of research, and to a wider breadth of functionalities. We hope that these extensions inspire more developers to create high-quality KNIME extensions in the future!

If you are a developer and would also like to contribute to our open source KNIME ecosystem, start developing and sharing your Java or Python based-extensions with the help of our documentation, guides and tutorials! If you have questions and/or comments, get in touch with our developers at community-contributions@knime.org or post on the “Community Extensions” section of the KNIME Forum.