The Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) is officially opening on 25/26th October 2006. The centre has been about a decade in the making, and aims to be a world-class research centre, with around £37 million (~$70 million) of initial funding from the Wellcome Trust charity, UK Research Councils and others.

Many computer scientists and software engineers are not familiar with basic biology or bioinformatics. Many biologists and bioinformaticians are not familiar with basic computer science or software engineering. This article points to some resources that can help with the former, and asks, what can be done about the latter?

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.

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.

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.

Football informatics, theory and practice: Germany 2006 The frenchman Pierre Bézier knew a thing or two about curves.

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.

Grid Computing already plays an important role in the life sciences, and will probably continue doing so for the forseeable future. BioGrid (Japan), myGrid (UK) and CoreGrid (Europe) are just three current examples, there are many more Grid and Super Duper Computer projects in the life sciences.

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.