O'Really?

November 24, 2009

Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS) 2009, Amsterdam

Filed under: conferences,semweb — Duncan Hull @ 12:30 am
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Snow in Amsterdam by Bas van GaalenLast Friday, the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam hosted a workshop called Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS) 2009.

Following on from last year [1], the workshop proceedings will be published at ceur-ws.org and in a special issue of the Journal of Biomedical Semantics, but if you want to find out what happened in the meantime, take a look at the #swat4ls2009 hashtag on twitter. Twitter makes bloggers lazy (they blog less but tweet more), but thankfully Nico Adams has studiously blogged the workshop very extensively.

Disruptive Technologies Director (cool job title!) Anita de Waard from Elsevier was asking what were the conclusions of the workshop. So here is an incomplete summary: Roughly speaking, people agreed to disagree (again). Keynote speaker Barend Mons argued that redundant data should be eliminated through the use of “nano-publications” and micro-attribution in his entertaining but controversial keynote. Some people in the audience disagreed with this. Greg Tyrelle thinks that redundancy is a feature, not a bug, in the Web and we have to deal with it. Alan Ruttenberg argued that semantic web reasoners  are required to clean up and sanity check all the messy and noisy biological data but emphasised the importance of Computer Scientists learning to speak Biologists language.

The good thing about this workshop is its size: small, friendly but internationally attended. Thanks to M. Scott Marshall, Albert Burger, Adrian Paschke, Paolo Romano and Andrea Splendiani for organising another good workshop, hope to see you again next year (if not before).

References

  1. Burger, A., Romano, P., Paschke, A., & Splendiani, A. (2009). Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences, 2008 – Introduction BMC Bioinformatics, 10 (Suppl 10) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-S10-S1 part of the special issue on SWAT4LS 2008

[CC-licensed picture of Amsterdam in the snow by Bas van Gaalen]

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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