Source: Wikipedia. CC-BY-SA April this year I blogged about an important SPARQL query for many chemists: getting CAS registry numbers from Wikidata.

There are many fancy tools to edit ontologies. I like simple editors, like nano. And like any hacker, I can hack OWL ontologies in nano. The hacking implies OWL was never meant to be hacked on a simple text editor; I am not sure that is really true. Anyways, HTML5 and RDFa will do fine, and here is a brief write up. This post will not cover the basics of RDFa and does assume you already know how triples work. If not, read this RDFa primer first.

Gang Fu and Evan Bolton have blogged about it previously, but their PubChemRDF paper is out now (doi:10.1186/s13321-015-0084-4). It very likely defines the largest collection of RDF triples using the CHEMINF ontology and I congratulate the authors with a increasingly powerful PubChem database.

If you are a scientist you have heard about the ORCID identifier by now. If not, you have been focusing on groundbreaking research and isolated yourself from the rest of the world, just to make it perfect and get that Nobel prize next year.

I have promised my Twitter followers the SPARQL query you have all been waiting for. Sadly, you had to wait for it for more than two months. I’m sorry about that.

December saw the end of this year’s PRA3006 course (aka #mcspils). Time to blog some screenshots of the student projects. Like last year, the aim is to use the Open PHACTS API to collect data with ops.js and which should then be visualized in a HTML page, preferably with d3.js. This year, all projects reached that goal.

The Royal Society of Chemistry and Wikipedia just released an interesting press release:

I previously wrote about the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) which has become a de facto standard for sharing data by web services. I personally still prefer something using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) because of its clear link to ontologies, but perhaps JSON-LD combines the best of both worlds.

Debugging is the process find removing a fault in your code (the etymology goes further back than the moth story, I learned today). Being able to debug is an essential programming skill, and being able to program flawlessly is not enough; the bug can be outside your own code.

I think the authors of the Open PHACTS proposal made a right choice in defining a small set of questions that the solution to be developed could be tested against. The questions being specific, it is much easier to understand the needs. In fact, I suspect it may even be a very useful form of requirement analysis, and makes it hard to keep using vague terms.

Yesterday, I received a letter from the Association of Universities The Netherlands (VSNU, @deVSNU) about Open Access. The Netherlands is for research a very interesting country: it’s small, meaning we have few resources to establish and maintain high profile centers, we also believe strong education benefits from distribution, so we we have many good universities, rather than a few excelling universities.