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.

Bioinformatics just published a paper from Schuemie and Kors (Erasmus University/NL, BioSemantics group): Jane: suggesting journals, finding experts (doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn006):

In 4.5 weeks, on Wednesday April 2 (13:30 precisely, Aula, Comeniuslaan 2, Nijmegen) I will publicly defend my PhD work performed in the Analytical Chemistry group of Prof.

/. just posted a story about the maize genome just published, for which the sequences can be downloaded from this FTP site. The files are not that large at all. But it makes me wonder… where are the .torrent files for the sequenced genomes? Here’s Davids catch on the story.

Some days have passed , and the Debian mirrors have now picked up the CDK package (unstable only so far), allowing you to sudo aptitude install libcdk-java from your favorite local mirror. The details are available from this packages.debian.org/libcdk-java page. The fact that it is listed as contrib is a small mistake; the package is really main material.