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:

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.

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.

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.

Last week, there was a very interesting thread on the DBPedia mailing list, on using Java for doing remote SPARQL queries. This was one of the features still missing in bioclipse.rdf. Richard Cyganiak replied pointing the code in Jena which conveniently does this and which bioclipse.rdf is already using anyway.

The Uppsala and EBI CDK-teams have been working hard on finishing the rewrite of JChemPaint I started with Niels earlier. While the EBI-team focused on the applet (and Swing application), the Uppsala team, obviously, focused on the SWT side, for integration into Bioclipse.

In preparation for the CDK workshop later this month, I am writing up my material for my kick-off presentation of the workshop. So, I better make it good. Using LaTeX at least overcomes my laziness which always made Word documents look stupid.

Besides Nature Chemistry , another journal was launched last week (see here and here): the Journal of Cheminformatics. First of all, congratulations to Chris and David for their efforts! While the journal only published one research paper yet, it already found its place on Chemical blogspace. I have two things I want to blog about: data rich publishing, and starting the scientific communication.