One of the most important Christmas traditions in Europe, aside from drinking too much, excessive eating and generally conspicuous over-consumption, are the Royal Institution Christmas lectures. This year, they are being given by Professor Christopher Bishop (pictured right), Chief Scientist at Microsoft Research and are on the subject of the Quest for the Ultimate Computer.

At the Microsoft e-Science workshop in Indianapolis, earlier this week Carole Goble was awarded with the first Jim Gray 2008 e-Science award, pictured here collecting the prize from Tony Hey of Microsoft Research.

Last Friday, the UK National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh hosted a workhop, Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (see SWAT4LS.org for the full details). Here are some incomplete and abbreviated notes from the workshop where there were some interesting people, paperware and software.

To add to the growing list of big boffins with blogs, Professor Douglas Kell has launched his BBSRC hosted blog. So has blogging finally gone from an innovative underground movement to grown-up mainstream everyday technology, as recently suggested in The Economist? How many more senior scientists might we see blogging in the future?

If you travel back in time, to around 2002, it isn’t difficult to find people claiming that Web services were going to be the new silver bullet technology to create world peace, eradicate global poverty and finally make some sense of all the data produced by the human genome project. Over hyped? Just a bit.

I have been virally infected by Martin Fenner’s “why do we blog” meme. 1. What is your blog about? Science and technology, especially bioinformatics, systems biology and the Web.

Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web We started writing this paper [1] over a year ago, so it’s great to see it finally published today. Here is the abstract: “Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries.

So, congratulations are due to Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler from The University of Manchester for winning the keenly fought best paper prize at the International Semantic Web Conference [ISWC 2008] in Karlsruhe for their paper “Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL”. An abstract of the paper is reproduced below: “A justification for […]

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a language for creating ontologies on the Web. It does exactly what it says on the tin. But what is an ontology? One way to think of it is as a better way of storing data and knowledge.

The United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is an “honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare”. Set up by none other than Abraham Lincoln himself, the academy publishes a prestigious scientific journal, called the […]

Today, Tuesday the 14th of October 2008, is Open Access Day. Like many others, this blog post is joining in by describing why Open Access matters – from a personal point of view.