As Peter announced in his blog, and I tweeted earlier, I have started as postdoctoral research associate in Peter’s group at the University of Cambridge, to work the next three months on Oscar, a chemical text mining tool. My tasks will focus on programmatical plumbing instead of method development, and I am aiming at integration with CDK-Taverna (see doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-159, and which is currently being ported to Taverna 2.2 by Andreas).

AJCann posted a blog today about what he doesn’t like about Mendeley. Abhishek replied that he does not like people complain about one tool, instead of pointing out a good alternative. Mendeley has two alternatives, Zotero and CiteULike (there is also Connotea, but got behind in evolution). Agreeing with @citeulike and @abhishektiwari, as a service provider any bad news is good news too: they provide opportunities to improve.

I have blogged about two Molecular Chemometrics principles so far: McPrinciple #1: access to data McPrinciple #2: be clear in what you mean Peter’s post #solo10: Green Chain Reaction; where to store the data? DSR? IR? BioTorrent, OKF or ??? gives me enough basis to write up a third principle: Molecular Chemometrics Principles #3 : We make scientific progress if we build on past achievements. Sounds logical, right?

I noted earlier this week that [d]uring the week [in Oxford ], someone (name and address is know at the editorial office) commented on the fact that my blog posts are somewhat difficult to follow;

The meetings in and around Oxford were great! I already wrote that the Predictive Toxicology workshop was brilliant (see Oxford… #1 ) and Oxford… #2 ), but I also very, very much enjoyed meeting up with Dan and Nico! During the week, someone (name and address is know at the editorial office) commented on the fact that my blog posts are somewhat difficult to follow; that is, it’s often not clear why I am posting what I am posting.

The Predictive Toxicology meeting is over. It was a great meeting, by any standard. Very much recommended, and many thanx to Barry for the organization! The meeting was a true workshop, with a mix of presentations and getting work done. I participated in a group that looked at mutagenicity of potential anti-malaria drugs from the datasets of GSK and Novartis recently release as Open Data.

Yesterday I arrived in Oxford, after a 3.5 hour bus transfer from London Stansted. Long, boring ride (though I might have seen a few red kites , but seeing that they were near extinct, I am wondering what other large bird of prey has strong split tail like a swallow). Showed once more that the UK infrastructure has hardly changed since the 19th century. Enjoying an undergraduate room at one of the colleges.

The announcement of the Panton Principles is the big news today, though Peter already spoke about them in May last year (see coverage on FriendFeed and Twitter). The four principles list in their short versions: When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes. Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.

Well, you might spot a pattern here; yes, another chemical SPARQL end point (actually, it shares the end point with the Solubility data). This time around Rich’s ChemPedia. Taking advantage of the CC0-licensed downloads , I have created a small Groovy script (using this JSON library) to convert the ChemPedia JSON into Notation3: import net.sf.json.groovy.JsonSlurper;

With pleasure I read Analogue or Digital? - Both, Please. Funnily, I just created MP3 (or, preferably Ogg Vorbis, superior but hardly any support by commercial companies, who rather seem to pay license fees) directly from the CD. Anyway… the blog wanders of to Google introducing searchable books, with many out-of-copyright.

RDF and SPARQL are two really useful Open Standards. Bioclipse-RDF is a plugin for Bioclipse that provide RDF functionality, among which using remote SPARQL end points. The MyExperiment team has set up an excellent RDF front end. For example, this is my MyExperiment account in RDF. The storage gets updated once every day (at this moment), but I’m sure that will become more often in the future.