As promised, I am working on JChemPaint. I have progressed in cleaning up the CDK trunk/ repository by removing traces of the old JChemPaint applet and application. And, importantly, removed the GeometryTools class that took rendering coordinates. The history here is that the original GeometryTools was renamed to GeometryToolsInternalCoordinates, but is now available as GeometryTools again. I still have to merge Niels’ additions with it, though.

FOAF rulez: it’s RDF. With RDF comes SPARQL. SPARQL needs a query engine, however. And there comes OpenRDF which created Sesame. I have to catch the train in about 15 minutes, so will not elaborate too much, but here are some Sesame 2.0.1 work: > create native. Please specify values for the following variables: Repository ID [native]: foafRepo Repository title [Native store]: FOAF Repository Triple indexes [spoc,posc]: Repository created >

Richard informed me (via Planet RDF) about N3 support in Tabulator. N3 is a more compressed version of RDF/XML, which I have been using so far, but both are RDF. Now, I don’t plan to use N3 for my FOAF experimenting, but two things caught my eye in the nice blog item. First, it has a very useful tip on .htaccess which you can use to teach Apache about MIME types, even when you do not have root access.

Two things I like blogging: 1. the turn-over of information; 2. the informal nature. There are more. The turn-over is optimized by commonly: 1. short blog items; 2. easily allows scanning tons of headlines; 3. often full of links if you want to know the details. Today, my eye was caught by Sugammadex Buzz for Organon over at Lamentations on Chemistry. The reason was Organon, which is just around the corner here. They had news about a new drug.

As promised, I’ll write a bit about using Bibliographic Ontology Specification (BIBO) over as bibliontology.com. I have written a basic XSLT to create a HTML GUI (open the RDF source in e.g. Firefox). Really basic: it only converts articles, and even assumes some conventions I found in examples in the BIBO wiki. I have not spotted a BIBO validator yet, so guessing a bit.

IUPAC chemical names, SMILES and InChIs are too long. InChIKeys are not unique enough because of safety reasons ( you have a 1 in 10 billion chance of blowing up your building ; well, odds are actually much, much lower than getting hit by Osama or friends, let alone a car). Wikipedia URIs do not cover enough chemical space. However, we need short identifier. Why, actually? Computers don’t care about long identifiers.

Because the ACS meeting where Henry will present something about FOAF in chemistry, is nearing very fast now (here’s the first blog it this series), it becomes urgent to beef up the Blue Obelisk FOAF network, now consisting of 7 members.

The MetWare project is going to make use of ontology technologies to control the content of the database, and a first step is to convert our MetWare database design into something using a formal ontology language. I have played with OWL in the past (see for example its use in Bioclipse), but was not overly happy with it in all situations. Then I read about SKOS, Simplified Knowledge Organisation System.

Bioinformatics just published a paper from Schuemie and Kors (Erasmus University/NL, BioSemantics group): Jane: suggesting journals, finding experts (doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn006): Having just gone into a different research field, I appreciate Jane as a useful tool to learn to find my way around in relevant literature.

In 4.5 weeks, on Wednesday April 2 (13:30 precisely, Aula, Comeniuslaan 2, Nijmegen) I will publicly defend my PhD work performed in the Analytical Chemistry group of Prof.

/. just posted a story about the maize genome just published, for which the sequences can be downloaded from this FTP site. The files are not that large at all. But it makes me wonder… where are the .torrent files for the sequenced genomes? Here’s Davids catch on the story. Update : OpenHelix discusses the matching genome browser, and indicates that hundreds of genomes are actively being studied.