O'Really?

The Hitch-hiking novelist Douglas Noel Adams (DNA) once remarked that the World Wide Web (WWW) is the only thing whose shortened form – ‘double-you double-you double-you-dot’ – takes three times longer to say than what it’s “short” for [1]. If he were still with us today, there is plenty of stuff at the 16^th International World Wide Web conference (WWW2007), currently underway in Banff, that would interest him. Here are some short, abbreviated notes on a couple of interesting papers at this years conference. They are relevant to bioinformatics and worth reading, whichever type of DNA you’re most interested in.

One full paper [2] by Daniel Goodman describes a scientific workflow language called Martlet. The motivating example is taken from climateprediction.net but I suspect some of the points they make about scientific workflows are relevant to bioinformatics too. Just like the recent post by Boscoh about functional programming, the paper discusses an inspired-by-Haskell functional approach to building and running workflows. Comparisons with other workflow systems like Taverna / SCUFL are drawn. Despite what they say, Taverna already uses a functional model (not an imperative one), it just hasn’t been published yet. The paper also draws comparisons between Martlet and other functional systems, like Google’s Map-Reduce. It concludes that the (allegedly) new Martlet programming model “raises the interesting possibility of a whole set of new algorithms just waiting to be discovered once people start to think about programming in this new way”. Which is an exciting possibility.

Another position paper [3] (warning: position paper = arm waving) by Anupriya Ankolekar et al argues that the Semantic Web and Web-Two-Point-Oh are complementary, rather than competing. Their motivating examples are a bit lame (Blogging a movie? Can’t they think of something more original?) …but they make some interesting (and obvious) points. The authors think that aggregators like Yahoo! Pipes! will play an important role in the emerging Semantic Web. Currently, there don’t seem to be too many bioinformaticians using Yahoo! pipes, perhaps they just don’t share their pipes / workflows yet?

Running in parallel to all of the above is the Health Care and Life Sciences Data Integration for the Semantic Web workshop, where more detailed discussion on the bio semweb is underway. As its a workshop, there are no full or position papers, but take a look at The State of the Nation in Life Science Data integration to get a flavour of what is going on.

Wether functional, semantic, Web-enabled or just buzzword-friendly, there is plenty of action in the scientific workflow field right now. If you’re interested in the webby stuff, next years conference, WWW2008, is in Beijing, China. I wonder if they will mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of that Google paper at WWW7 back in 1998? The deadline for papers at WWW2008 will probably be sometime in November 2007, but around 90% of submitted papers will be rejected if previous years are anything to go by. If you’re thinking of doing a paper, DON’T PANIC about those intimidating statistics, because bioinformatics is bursting full of interesting and hard problems that challenge the state-of-the-art. The kind of stuff that will go down well at Dubya Dubya Dubya.

(Photo credit: Fire Monkey Fish)

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