nodalpoint.org

Scientists usually share information with collaborators from all around the world. For that purpose, eyeOS (www.eyeos.org) provides an invaluable system to access and share documents, create and save data files or store crucial personal and professional information.

To see eyeOS widely used by scientists all around the world, we initiated the eyeLIMS project ! eyeLIMS is a community-driven project which aims at providing a Free, web-based, Open Source Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) powered by eyeOS.

There are a few remaining places left on the Building Scientific Workflows for Bioinformatics and Systems biology using Taverna course held in Manchester, UK on 15th April 2008. Attendance at the workshop is free, but participants will have to cover their own travel costs. Due to the hands-on nature of the workshop, numbers are limited to 30, so there is a ‘first-come, first-serve’ policy on bookings. Book now to avoid disappointment!

Well it's that time of year again. The 15th annual stamp collecting edition of the journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), also known as the 2008 Database issue [1], was published earlier this week. This year there are 1078 databases listed in the collection, 110 more than the previous one (see Figure 1). As we pass the one thousand databases mark (1kDB) I wonder, what proportion of the data in these databases will never be used?

It seems that most bioinformatics web services use SOAP, and the extent of their documentation is the accompanying WSDL file - not very helpful for anyone who wants to use them outside a workflow-type tool like Taverna, and even then often not descriptive enough to know what should go in each field.

I recently posted some scripts on my blog (match.py a Python script that calculates the RMSD of PDB structures). It's a little esoteric, but I thought someone out there might find it useful. Here's the rub. Hours after posting it, I got a comment. When I read the comment, I was rather surprised - it was someone advertising a program that does the same thing as mine. The question I want to ask, do you think this is kosher?

After a long hiatus SciView is back with a new interview with Dr Roderic Page from the University of Glasgow. Dr Page is the current Editor in Chief of Syatematic Biology and developer of TreeView(X), the beloved phylogenetic tree visualization software. He was also the editor of the Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.

As usual here is the link.

Enjoy.

From the guy who is already known for:
"woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual"
"a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos"
"argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured"
"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great"
Comes another:
"all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really"

The Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), will soon be publishing their special issue on Semantic Biomedical Mashups (can you fit any more buzzwords into a Call For Papers?!). Ben Good and friends have submitted a paper on their Entity Describer which extends connotea using some Semantic Web goodness. They'd appreciate your comments on their submitted manuscript over at i9606. As Ben says, their pre-publication turns out to be an interesting experiment "figuring out how blogging might fit into the academic publishing landscape". If this interests you, get commenting now!

The past month or so has seen a mini-explosion in new blogs of interest to our readers. I've added half a dozen or so to the wiki list. Feel free to edit or add new ones if you have wiki access, or submit suggestions either via submit weblink or as a comment here.

I know I've forgotten one or two, please don't be offended!

I decided to jump on the bandwagon, the same Rosie Redfield jumped because of Pedro: Open Science.