Blog; Alma; ACS

I am stiil working out how the blogging software works – I lost the last post… Also formatting code, XML, etc seems to be hairy. So forgive some of the early stuff. Also Jim showed me today I had to moderate comments, so apologies for anyone who thought I had inhibited their post. Everything posted will appear except blatant spam.
Very pleasant visit from Alma Swan – guru and expert in Open Access. We actually talked about Open Data – how data in scientific publications can be marked up semantically, published, archived and reused. We are doing a lot of this at present – see reply to Jean-Claude Bradley.
I’m talking on Sunday at the American Chemical Society on “eChemistry”. eScience – the Grid – cyberinfrastructure – has a lot of interest and support in almost all disciplines – physics, bioscience, medical, geoscience, astronomy. But not chemistry. Why not? I’ll be exploring these ideas in future posts.
The blog is, I hope, an ideal mechanism for recording thoughts and getting peer-review on them in a way you can’t do in formal publications where if you haven’t done an experiment/calculation you often can’t publish. I will blog a numer of ideas that I want to explore at the ACS meeting so there will be a permanent record. One of my problems is that the media I use – hypertext and java – isn’t easily ar5chivable so some talks don’t have records. With the blog I hope there will be some words to record.