A molecular structure without any properties in meaningless. Structure generators can easily build up a database of molecules of unlimited size. 30 million in CAS, 20 million in ChemSpider or 15 million in PubChem is nothing yet. The value comes in when linking those structures with experimental properties.

CompLife 2007 was held 1.5 weeks ago in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The number of participants was much lower than last year in Cambridge. Ola and I gave a tutorial on Bioclipse, and Thorsten one on KNIME.

I value ODOSOS very high: they are a key component of science, and scientific research, though not every scientist sees these importance yet. I strongly believe that scientific progress is held back because of scientific results not being open; it’s putting us back into the days of alchemy, where experiments were like black boxes and procedures kept secretly.

The second part of the morning session featured a presentation by Sirisha Gollapudi which spoke about mining biological graphs, such as protein-protein interaction networks and metabolic pathways. Patterns detection for nodes with only one edge, and cycles etc, using Taverna.

I arrived at the EBI last night for the Taverna workshop, during which the design of Taverna2 is presented and workflow examples are discussed. Several ‘colleagues’ from Wageningen and the SARA computing center in Amsterdam are present, along with many other interesting people. This afternoon is my presentation.

Peter is writing up a 1FTE grant proposal for someone to work on the question how automatic agents and, more interestingly, the blogosphere are changing, no improving, the dissemination of scientific literature. He wants our input.

Two working days left before I’m off to two conferences. First, next Thursday/Friday, the two day CompLife2007 in Utrecht/NL, with sessions on genomics, systems biology, medical information and data analysis. And, on the second day tutorials on KNIME and CDK/Bioclipse. I will try to orient as much as possible around MS-based metabolomics, and metabolite identity in particular. Last year the conference was very interesting.

Craig James wants to make SMILES an open standard, and this has been received with much enthusiasm. SMILES (Simplified molecular input line entry specification) is a de facto standard in chemoinformatics, but the specification is not overly clear, which Craig wants to address. The draft is CC-licensed and will be discussed on the new Blue Obelisk blueobelisk-smiles mailing list.

Pierre pointed me to Google’s view:timeline feature, which shows the search results on a time line, by recognizing phrases like “on 25 September 2000…”. This is its view on the Chemistry Development Kit:

A couple of people now confirmed the problem with the ACS journal RSS feeds . Being back behind my desktop machine, I can post the obligatory screenshot:

I was just about to install Subclipse (for the millionth time), and googled for the update site details: