O'Really?

O’Really? is a personal laboratory notebook written by me, Duncan Hull (also known as dullhunk).

I’m currently employed as a software engineer at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), in the UK. This  laboratory web blog (“LaBlog” if you like) documents  various experiments in:

1. Biological and Life Sciences generally, specifically the application of more Open Science to problems in scientific publishing in biomedicine. This includes Open Source Software, Open Access publishing and other forms of Open Data.
2. Informatics, the Science of Information, especially biological informatics and chemical informatics. Most of this research revolves around the use and abuse of public databases and ontologies.
3. The Revolutionary World Wide Web, 20 years after it’s invention by a scientist for use by scientists in a scientific laboratory, the full potential of the web has yet to be realised in Science. Viva La Webolutión!

I’m pretty slapdash when it comes to taking notes, so you might find them incomplete, half-baked, uncertain, exploratory, opinionated and nonsensical. Please feel free to comment constructively, this is a blog after all and publishing laboratory notes openly is also an experiment in itself.

Generally speaking O’Really? records some of the research I’m doing into building a better, cheaper and faster Web of Science, plus whatever else tickles my fancy. See some recent posts in the feed for examples. DISCLAIMER: This blog is deliberately informal, chatty, irreverent and hopefully fun, in the style of down-the-pub or coffee-room conversation. I make every reasonable effort to get the facts straight, but if you spot any errors, please set me straight.

By way of “full disclosure” I should also say I pay for this site myself, but do not make any significant financial profit from it. So this site is a shop window for research I’m doing as well as related work. Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily representative of my employer.

Unless stated otherwise, words, pictures, audio and video you find here are licensed under a CC-BY license, which requires attribution, but allows free redistribution (see below). So feel free to copy, distribute, transmit, remix and adapt work you find here, just give me credit and attribution by linking back to where you originally took the data from.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.