I am speaking at the Eduserv Symposium on London in late May on the subject of the importance of identity systems for advancing the open research agenda. From the announcement: The Eduserv Symposium 2009 will be held on Thursday 21st May 2009 at the Royal College of Physicians, London.

So in the last post I got all abstract about what the record of process might require and what it might look like. In this post I want to describe a concrete implementation that could be built with existing tools. What I want to think about is the architecture that is required to capture all of this information and what it might look like. The example I am going to use is very simple.

When it comes to getting data up on the web, I am actually a great optimist. I think things are moving in the right direction and with high profile people like Tim Berners-Lee making the case, the with meme of “Linked Data” spreading, and a steadily improving set of tools and interfaces that make all the complexities of RDF, OWL, OAI-ORE, and other standards disappear for the average user, there is a real sense that this might come together.

On Friday night we went down to London to see the final night of the English National Opera’s run of Doctor Atomic, the new opera from John Adams with a libretto by Peter Sellars. The opera focuses on the days and hours leading up to first test firing of an atomic bomb at the Trinity site on 15 July 1945.

I am constantly intrigued by the way that some sort of collective web-based intelligence seems to cause specific issues to pop up in multiple places at the same time.

This post is both a follow up to last week’s post on the cost’s of peer review and a response to Duncan Hull‘s post of nine or so months ago proposing a game of “Fantasy Science Funding“. The game requires you to describe how you would distribute the funding of the BBSRC if you were a benign (or not so benign) dictator. The post and the discussion should be read bearing in mind my standard disclaimer. Peer review is in crisis.

There are a set of memes that seem to be popping up with increasing regularity in the last few weeks. The first is that more of the outputs of scientific research need to be published. Sometimes this means the publication of negative results, other times it might mean that a community doesn’t feel they have an outlet for their particular research field. The traditional response to this is “we need a journal” for this.

Last night I made it for the first time to one of the BathCamp evening events organised by Mike Ellis in Bath. The original BathCamp was a BarCamp held in late summer last year that I couldn’t get to, but Mike has been organising a couple of evenings since. I thought I’d go along because it sounded like fun, and I knew a few of the people were good value, and that I didn’t know any of the others.

Late last year the Research Information Network held a workshop in London to launch a report, and in many ways more importantly, a detailed economic model of the scholarly publishing industry.

Following on from my post last month about using OpenID as a way of identifying individual researchers,  Chris Rusbridge made the sensible request that when conversations go spreading themselves around the web it would be good if they could be summarised and aggregated back together. Here I am going to make an attempt to do that – but I won’t claim that this is a completely unbiased account.

It’s been an interesting week or so in the Chemistry online world. Following on from my musings about data services and the preparation I was doing for a talk the week before last I asked Tony Williams whether it was possible to embed spectra from ChemSpider on a generic web page in the same way that you would embed a YouTube video, Flickr picture, or Slideshare presentation.