Last Friday, the UK National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh hosted a workhop, S emantic W eb A pplications and T ools for the L ife S ciences (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: Thanks to Kevin Emamy, Richard Cameron, Martin Flack, and Ian Mulvany for answering questions on the CiteULike and Connotea mailing lists; and Greg Tyrelle for ongoing discussion about metadata and the semantic Web nodalpoint.org.

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: But what does it all mean?

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. Instead of just capturing and describing data in a databases, ontology languages like OWL provide ways to capture and describe knowledge in a knowledge base.

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 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , better known as just

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. According to the wikipedia article Open Access (OA) is “free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals.

Any budding biomedical scientists out there, interested in doing a PhD, take note: The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) – European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is having an open day on Monday 3rd November 2008.

I look at the world and I notice it’s turning While my keyboard gently weeps With every mistake we must surely be learning Still my keyboard gently weeps Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh, oh oh Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.