O'Really?

A brief wiki-report and some wiki-links from the first short and introductory day of Network Applications and Tools in Biology (NETTAB 2009) in Sicily where there was a tutorial on Technologies of wiki resources and bio-wikis delivered by Paolo Romano and Elda Rossi. This covered Gene Wiki, Wikiproteins, Wikigenes and Wikipathways [1-4].

There is already a bewildering array of different wikitechnology, thankfully wikimatrix (“compare them all”) gives wikicomparisons on some of the wikisolutions are already out there (open vs. closed – more on this later).

The theme of the workshop this year has been Technologies, Tools and Applications for Collaborative and Social Bioinformatics Research and Development. So wikis seems like an obvious place to start.

Since user-driven social software is becoming increasingly important, here is a list of of few of the people involved in this years workshop,

1. Giampaolo Bella
2. Luca Bortolussi
3. Leandro Ciuffo
4. Alfredo Ferro
5. Rosalba Giugno
6. Alessandro Lagana
7. Stefania Parodi
8. Alfredo Pulvirenti
9. Paolo Romano
10. Elda Rossi
11. Andrea Splendiani

I don’t know about you, but those names sound deliciously exotic to my non-italian speaking Inglese ears. When I read the list of names above, it sounds like an elite squad of the Azzurri (football team). You would have Romano as capitano in the middle of the park, joined by Ferro, Ciuffo and Rossi. Then at the back you’ve got the famous italian Catenaccio (locking defence: Paolo Maldini style), the kind that wins world cups (remember 2006?) – there’s nothing getting past Parodi, Giugno, Pulvirenti and Bortolussi in defence. Last but not least, I’d put Splendiani and Bella up front, they sound like strikers to me, mostly because of their surnames.

What all this footballing nonsense has to do with NETTAB and wikis I don’t know. There’s probably some obvious-but-cliched link between Football and Science (by virtue of them both being collaborative and competitive team sports). But, really I just couldn’t resist a little Italian-inspired post about football, I hope to post some more notes on days two and three of the NETTAB workshop later… where most of the action took place.

References

1. Mons, B., Ashburner, M., Chichester, C., van Mulligen, E., Weeber, M., den Dunnen, J., van Ommen, G., Musen, M., Cockerill, M., Hermjakob, H., Mons, A., Packer, A., Pacheco, R., Lewis, S., Berkeley, A., Melton, W., Barris, N., Wales, J., Meijssen, G., Moeller, E., Roes, P., Borner, K., & Bairoch, A. (2008). Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins Genome Biology, 9 (5) DOI: 10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-r89
2. Hoffmann, R. (2008). A wiki for the life sciences where authorship matters Nature Genetics, 40 (9), 1047-1051 DOI: 10.1038/ng.f.217
3. Huss, J., Orozco, C., Goodale, J., Wu, C., Batalov, S., Vickers, T., Valafar, F., & Su, A. (2008). A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function PLoS Biology, 6 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175
4. Pico, A., Kelder, T., van Iersel, M., Hanspers, K., Conklin, B., & Evelo, C. (2008). WikiPathways: Pathway Editing for the People PLoS Biology, 6 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060184