O'Really?

June 19, 2009

Nettab 2009 Day Three: Semantic Integration

Filed under: conferences — Duncan Hull @ 11:26 am
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Catania ElephantA brief report (well just some scribbled notes, bullet points and links really) on the third and final day of Network Applications and Tools in Biology (NETTAB) 2009 in Catania, Sicily. There was a special section on Methods and Tools for RNA Structure and Functional Analysis. Disclaimer: RNA mania isn’t really my thing – so the RNA presentations and papers are grossly under-represented in this mini-report (sorry).

  • Keynote: Semantically Integrated eCommunities in Biomedicine: Next-Generation Models of Biomedical Communication, Tim Clark Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. His presentation opened by asking: What do the following have in common?

    1. Alzheimer’s Disease
    2. Huntington’s Disease
    3. Nicotine Addiction
    4. Schizophrenia
    5. Bipolar Disorder
    6. Autism
    7. Parkinson’s Disease
    8. ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
    9. Neuropathic Pain
    10. Major Depressive Disorder
    11. Cancer (multiple forms)

    Answer:

    1. Highly complex disorders
    2. Much information, incomplete understanding
    3. Inadequate treatment options
    4. Huge cost in human suffering
    5. Multi-factorial causality
    6. Require multi-disciplinary collaboration for progress to understanding and cure

    Tim discussed using The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) a reusable, semantically-aware toolkit for building on-line communities. These make heavy use of Open Linked Data, controlled vocabularies and  Drupal to build websites to tackle the above disorders. For example pdonlineresearch.org (Parkinson’s Disease), StemBook.org (Harvard Stem Cell Institute) and alzforum.org (Alzheimers) [1]. The controlled vocabulary and ontology approach works well for understood stuff (where named entities are known) but not so good at the outer boundaries of our knowledge. Reusable framework for building web communities, Uses shared ontologies/vocabularies, Open source, freely available.

  • Michaela Guendel (Leaf Bioscience) presented DC-THERA Directory: A Knowledge Management System to Support Collaboration on Dendritic Cell and Immunology Research,  using cell type ontology, dendritic cell ontology, chebi, obi. Project involves Andrea Splendiani, Ciro Scognamiglio and Marco Brandizi
  • GePh-CARD: an information exchange application for an Hub & Spoke Network for Skeletal Dysplasias was presented by M. Mordenti & L. Sangiorgi
  • Panel Discussion: Collaborative and Social Bioinformatics Research and Development: Why, When, Who and How? Alex Bateman, Tim Clark, Duncan Hull and all participants. This panel discussion concentrated on Who? (experts vs. non experts, crowds vs. individuals, how to motivate and reward people to contribute to online communities. community annotation of data only possible when curators cede control of data) and then Where? (open wikis vs. closed ones, private vs. public data, wikis often not suitable for highly structured data, centralised vs. distributed systems)
  • Keynote: Bacterial Phylogeny and Taxonomy in the High-Throughput Sequencing World, Gabriel Valiente
  • Magdalena Musielak (has worked with Piotr Byzia) presented RNA tertiary structure prediction with ModeRNA,
  • Olivier Perriquet presented Improved heuristic for pairwise RNA secondary structure prediction,
  • Giampaolo Bella talked about Analysing microRNA by Theorem Proving. qualitative logic proving before quantitative experimental measures e.g. “shall we go to restaurant” before “how much does it cost”?
  • Mapping miRNA genes on human fragile sites and translocation breakpoints Alfredo Ferro et al.
  • Keynote: Computational challenages in the study of small RNAs Doron Betel, memorial sloan-kettering cancer center
  • microrna.gr. a suite of web based tools for elucidating microrna function was presented by Giorgo L. Papadopoulous, DIANA bioinformatics lab, biomedical Science research center, Alexander Fleming, Vari, Athens, Greece
  • Last but not least there was miRScape: a cytoscape plugin to annotate biological networks with microRNAs

The Tenth NETTAB (2010) Workshop will be in Rome, where the theme will be Oncology Bioinformatics and will be held at the end of  May or beginning of  June 2010.

References

  1. Das, S., Girard, L., Green, T., Weitzman, L., Lewis-Bowen, A., & Clark, T. (2009). Building biomedical web communities using a semantically aware content management system Briefings in Bioinformatics, 10 (2), 129-138 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbn052

June 15, 2009

Nettab 2009 Day One: Bio-wikis (and football)

Filed under: conferences,football — Duncan Hull @ 4:19 pm
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Drogba, Eto'o, Ronalda, Beckham, Messi, Ibrahimovic, Del Piero and KakaA 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

May 21, 2009

Upcoming Gig: The Italian Job at NETTAB

Filed under: conferences,semweb — Duncan Hull @ 11:06 am
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NETTAB: Network Tools and Applications in BiologyNetwork Tools and Applications in Biology (NETTAB) is a series of workshops in Bioinformatics. It focuses on the most promising and innovative ICT tools and their utility in Bioinformatics. These workshops aim to introduce participants to the evolving network standards and technologies that are being applied to the field of biology.

Since 2001, the NETTAB workshops have being doing a Giro d’Italia or  Grand Tour of Italy; Genova, Bologna, Naples, Sardinia, Lake Como and Pisa have all played host to the workshop. This year, NETTAB 2009 is in Catania at the Università degli Studi di Catania in Sicily close to Mount Etna.

There is special theme for this years workshop, held on June 10-13, on Technologies, Tools and Applications for Collaborative and Social Bioinformatics Research and Development. So I’m very pleased that Paolo Romano asked me to do a keynote presentation (w00t!) on the work we have been doing in the REFINE project and myExperiment. Grazie Paolo, grazie. And thanks Carole Goble too for the recommendation.

If you’re going to NETTAB this year, see you there. If you’d like to come, today is the last day for the early bird discount, sign up at the registration page. The scientific programme looks interesting, it will be good to meet Alex Bateman and Tim Clark and the rest of this years speakers.

Now, if my keynote presentation is going to (as Michael Caine once famously said [1]) “blow the bl**dy doors off” [2], it needs loads more work. So I’d better get back to it. Ciao!

[Update: See reports from day one, day two and day three of NETTAB 2009.]

References

  1. Peter Collinson and Troy Kennedy-Martin (1969) The Italian Job
  2. Michael Caine (1969) “You’re only supposed to blow the bl**dy doors off!”
  3. Cannata, N., Schröder, M., Marangoni, R., & Romano, P. (2008). A Semantic Web for bioinformatics: goals, tools, systems, applications BMC Bioinformatics, 9 (Suppl 4) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-9-S4-S1

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