BACKGROUND: Professionals in the biomedical domain are confronted with an 
increasing mass of data. Developing methods to assist professional end users in 
the field of Knowledge Discovery to identify, extract, visualize and understand 
useful information from these huge amounts of data is a huge challenge. However, 
there are so many diverse methods and methodologies available, that for 
biomedical researchers who are inexperienced in the use of even relatively 
popular knowledge discovery methods, it can be very difficult to select the most 
appropriate method for their particular research problem.
RESULTS: A web application, called KNODWAT (KNOwledge Discovery With Advanced 
Techniques) has been developed, using Java on Spring framework 3.1. and 
following a user-centered approach. The software runs on Java 1.6 and above and 
requires a web server such as Apache Tomcat and a database server such as the 
MySQL Server. For frontend functionality and styling, Twitter Bootstrap was used 
as well as jQuery for interactive user interface operations.
CONCLUSIONS: The framework presented is user-centric, highly extensible and 
flexible. Since it enables methods for testing using existing data to assess 
suitability and performance, it is especially suitable for inexperienced 
biomedical researchers, new to the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. 
For testing purposes two algorithms, CART and C4.5 were implemented using the 
WEKA data mining framework.