I am doctor now; I shall now be addressed as weledelzeergeleerde Egon; translating to something like quite-noble-very-knowledgeable, hahahaha. I’ll put up a few photo’s of the ceremony, which is actually quite formal at the Radboud University, later.

In about 26 hours from now, I will be defending my PhD thesis. Follow that link to read the summary; I was thinking if publishing my introduction and discussion (the rest has been published in peer-reviewed journals) on Nature Precedings; would that be a good idea? Otherwise, I’ll post it in my blog.

A bit over 2 years ago I published a UML diagram showing the dependencies between CDK modules . Since then I lot of new modules have been defined, added or factored out from the extra module (click to zoom):

As promised, I am working on JChemPaint. I have progressed in cleaning up the CDK trunk/ repository by removing traces of the old JChemPaint applet and application. And, importantly, removed the GeometryTools class that took rendering coordinates. The history here is that the original GeometryTools was renamed to GeometryToolsInternalCoordinates, but is now available as GeometryTools again. I still have to merge Niels’ additions with it, though.

FOAF rulez: it’s RDF. With RDF comes SPARQL. SPARQL needs a query engine, however. And there comes OpenRDF which created Sesame.

Richard informed me (via Planet RDF) about N3 support in Tabulator. N3 is a more compressed version of RDF/XML, which I have been using so far, but both are RDF. Now, I don’t plan to use N3 for my FOAF experimenting, but two things caught my eye in the nice blog item.

Two things I like blogging: 1. the turn-over of information; 2. the informal nature. There are more . The turn-over is optimized by commonly: 1. short blog items; 2. easily allows scanning tons of headlines; 3. often full of links if you want to know the details.

As promised , I’ll write a bit about using Bibliographic Ontology Specification (BIBO) over as bibliontology.com. I have written a basic XSLT to create a HTML GUI (open the RDF source in e.g. Firefox). Really basic: it only converts articles, and even assumes some conventions I found in examples in the BIBO wiki. I have not spotted a BIBO validator yet, so guessing a bit.

IUPAC chemical names, SMILES and InChIs are too long. InChIKeys are not unique enough because of safety reasons (you have a 1 in 10 billion chance of blowing up your building; well, odds are actually much, much lower than getting hit by Osama or friends, let alone a car). Wikipedia URIs do not cover enough chemical space.

Because the ACS meeting where Henry will present something about FOAF in chemistry, is nearing very fast now (here’s the first blog it this series ), it becomes urgent to beef up the Blue Obelisk FOAF network, now consisting of 7 members.

The MetWare project is going to make use of ontology technologies to control the content of the database, and a first step is to convert our MetWare database design into something using a formal ontology language. I have played with OWL in the past (see for example its use in Bioclipse ), but was not overly happy with it in all situations.