Alistair Miles, of SKOS fame, who formerly worked in our research group, spent yesterday afternoon catching up with us, and has written a nice blog post on the MalariaGEN Informatics Blog describing our current activities, including our work on the Open Citations Corpus, and how they might intersect with the data management activities of the MalariaGEN, the Malaria Genome Epidemiology Network for which he now works.
He has also written a separate blog post reflecting on the work he did when in our group working on the JISC FlyWeb Project to develop openflydata.org, as an update on his earlier post, which is well worth a read if you wish to understand how semantic web techniques can be used to integrate data from heterogeneous and non-compatible databases in distributed locations.
Graham Klyne, who was part of that FlyWeb Project, has been instrumental in taking those same ‘data web’ data integration techniques and re-applying them to data integration in the classical arts, using the CIDOC-CRM data model developed for the museum community, to underpin CLAROS, The World of Art on the Semantic Web. It now looks as though Graham’s current work with Jun Zhao and others on the provenance of bioinformatics workflows, within the EU Workflows4Ever Project, might be of assistance to Al in his current work with Plasmodium SNP discovery and genotyping pipelines for MalariaGEN.
It’s nice to stand back from time to time and see all these activities interlinking as a whole. Thanks, Al.
My next two posts follow on from this, in that the first explores reasons why the majority of researchers don’t presently publish the datasets underlying their research articles , and the second summarizes the various JISC projects in which we are involved as a research group, including the Open Citations Project, that seek to mitigate this problem and provide tools and services that make data publication and subsequent data citation easier.