Friday, May 11, 2007

Science Foo Camp 2007 and other links

Nature is organizing another Science Foo Camp. There are already a couple of bloggers that have been invited (Jean-Claude Bradley, Pierre, PZ Myers, Peter MR, Andrew Walkingshaw). There is a "Going to Camp" group in Nature Network, and the scifoo tag in connotea to explore if you want to dig deeper.

I was there last year and I can only thank again Timo for inviting me and encourage everyone that has been invited to go. It was a chance to get to know fascinating people and hear about new ideas. In the off chance of any of the organizers is reading this ... please try to get together people from Freebase (or similar company) with the people involved in biological standards (like Nicolas Le Novère).

A quick hello to two new bioinformatic related blogs: Beta Science by Morgan Langille and Suicyte Notes.

(via Pierre, Neil and Nautilus) In a correspondence letter published by Nature, Mark Gerstein, Michael Seringhaus and Stanley Fields discuss the implementation of structured, machine readable abstracts. As I mentioned in a comment to Neil's post, this is one of those ideas that have been around, that most people would agree to but somehow it is never implemented. In this case it would have to start on the publisher's side. As we have seen with other small technical implementations, like RSS feeds, once a main publisher sets this up others will follow.