CompLife'06 - Day 1

CompLife'06 started today in Cambridge, UK. About 80 people are attending the meeting, and topics range from systems biology to QSAR. This evening there was a free software session mostly focussing on opensource software. Twelve projects were presented, among which the CDK (by me) and Bioclipse (by Ola), in five minute presentations, and a two hour demo period during a reception (free speech and free beer :). We had our brand new fliers with us, as well as a large poster for some additional branding.

One research presentation compared a number of fingerprint implementations in a QSAR study, and CDK came out very well, beating a few commercial programs. The free software session was full of CDK, however, with AMBIT, iBabel, Bioclipse and KNIME mentioning the CDK.

The latter is really interesting: it's a workflow program just like Taverna or PipeLine Pilot, which is using the Eclipse RCP as starting point, just like Bioclipse. And like the other two, KNIME has CDK integration, at least for displaying structures.