nodalpoint.org

Scifoo is here again, which means I'll be in San Francisco for a bit. If you're going, see you there (don't forget the flowers). If you're not going, but would like to meet up somewhere in the Bay Area (Thursday 2nd or Sunday/Monday 5th/6th) send an email to duncan.hull \ate\ cs.man.ac.uk .

It's almost time for the monthly compendium of bioinformatics-oriented material from the blogosphere that we call Bio::Blogs. I'll be hosting this month so send your submissions to the usual bioblogs <at> gmail <dot> com. Remember, you can send one of your own posts or recommend someone else's.

The official publishing date is August 1st (Wednesday), but I may delay until Friday 3rd, depending on other commitments this week.

Updated: Friday 3rd it is, so there's still time to get those submissions in!

The SciView project is back with an interview with Dr. Rosie Redfield from the UBC. Dr Redfield talks a little bit about Open Science and Bioinformatics, and also about science. The link is

http://blindscientist.genedrift.org/2007/07/26/sciview-part-4-interview-...

Enjoy.

There has been an ongoing debate in the semantic web community, for many years now, about whether identifiers for resources should be URLs or URNs. This debate has recently flared up on the HCLS mailing list in the form of URLs+1 LSIDs -1, and since some of you not in the know maybe wondering what all the fuss is about, in this post I will try to explain why identifiers must be URLs and why the semantic web is broken by design.

First up, meet-up(s) details are still being worked out, Roland will be attending tomorrow and David Aanensen has suggested getting together after the cocktail reception this evening, meet at the exit after the event. I'll try and update via email or this post before I leave tonight.

This year the SIG ticket was open so, I drifted into talks on on biopathways, alternative splicing, and bioontologies, here-in, a few of my picks:

Greetings from Vienna ISMB 2007, the weather is nice and our tribe is out in force for the two day SIGs. I'm currently sitting in on BOSC waiting to hear about the latest AJAX genome browser developments. I don't plan to 'live-blog' any of the talks, instead I will keep notes and post some of the highlights at the end of the day.

If any nodalpoint readers attending ISMB would like to meet up for a beer drop me a note at greg[dot]tyrelle[at]gmail[dot]com.

Deepak writes:

I wish nodalpoint would aggregate posts from its members

Wishes can come true. If you're (a) a registered Nodalpoint user, (b) have a blog with content related to Nodalpoint and (c) would like to syndicate your posts on Nodalpoint, read on for more information. To jump straight to the content, look for the "News aggregator" link in the right-hand sidebar.

This is a test page.

What's the best way to discuss "open research"? Let's say that you have a research problem. You might post it on your blog and receive comments. Or you might create a wiki with questions, to which people can contribute answers. All well and good, but then we end up with useful content spread all over the web. What's the solution? Centralised portals, aggregators? Or are people happy to search multiple sources for content?

I don't know the answers. However, in the spirit of Mike's open science article on our wiki, I created an open research section. The idea is that if someone performing open research has a question and you have an answer, you can post it here and point them to it. I've kicked things off with a look at a recent bioinformatics problem from Rosie's blog.

I'm not proposing that this be the central point for these kinds of discussions - it's just another alternative and one that we can all find.

If you're the kind of bioinformatician who is interested in using Grid or Web Services, then the Practical High Throughput Computing for Bioinformatics course held at Imperial College London, on the 16th to 20th July, would probably be worth attending.