The AAAI conference finished last Thursday, here are some highlights and papers that might be worth reading if you are interested in building and / or using a more “intelligent” (and possibly semantic) web in bioinformatics. Here are the papers or talks I enjoyed the most and hope you might also find them useful or inspiring. Unifying Logical and Statistical AI talk given by Pedro Domingos.

As the number of bioinformatics services on the web increases, finding a tool or database that performs the task you require can be problematic. At the AAAI poster session on Wednesday, I presented our paper describing a novel solution to this problem.

Tim Berners-Lee delivered his one hour keynote at the AAAI’06 conference yesterday on the Semantic Web, after an introduction from Yolanda Gil. Tim gave an impassioned speech covering the last 16 years of the web and discussed the future of sharing data on the web using persistent URI’s and W3C standards like RDF and OWL. At the end of it all, there were some searching questions from Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google Labs.

LISP Hacker and Painter Paul Graham writes entertaining essays about technology. His latest piece, discusses how important and sometimes lucrative ideas usually come from the “garage” outside rather than the inside, what he calls The Power of the Marginal. His essay rambles a bit in places, but has some interesting observations that are relevant to bioinformatics.

Football informatics, theory and practice: Germany 2006 The frenchman Pierre Bézier knew a thing or two about curves. But as World Cup fever tightens its grip around the globe, it is the footballers in Germany who are showing us just how much they know about the practical science of curving and bending the ball into the goal.

There are a growing number of biomedical services out there on Wild Wild Web for performing various computations on DNA, RNA and proteins as well as the associated scientific literature. Currently, using and debugging these services can be hard work. SOAP UI (SOAP User Interface) is newish and handy free tool to help debug services and get your in silico experiments and analyses done, hopefully more easily.

Grid Computing already plays an important role in the life sciences, and will probably continue doing so for the forseeable future. BioGrid (Japan), ^my Grid (UK) and CoreGrid (Europe) are just three current examples, there are many more Grid and Super Duper Computer projects in the life sciences. So, is there an accessible Hitch Hikers Guide to the Grid for newbies, especially bioinformaticians?

The 15th International World Wide Web conference is currently underway in Edinburgh, Bonny Scotland. As usual, this popular conference has some good papers, only 11%* of submissions are accepted. One particular paper caught my eye: One Document to Bind Them: Combining XML, Web Services, and the Semantic Web.

The BBC programme catalogue has recently gone online, and provides a demonstration of the applications that can be built using web technology such as Ruby on Rails, RDF, FOAF, web feeds, tag clouds and sparklines.