ANNOUNCE: Visions of a Semantic (Molecular) Future

I have been given a wonderful opportunity by the Unilever Centre to invite people that I have worked with to present visions of the Semantic Future. It’s a Free (as in speech) free (as in beer) event in January 2011 and consists of two optional chunks – a weekend of hacking and a 1-day symposium with visionaries that I have worked with. The goal of the event is to invent the future, with emphases on Openness, (molecular) science, scholarly communications, citizen activities, and creative action.

It’s also to say thank you to the many people who have helped us get to where we are. I’m hoping that many of our past collaborators will be able to come to some of this. It’s to show the impressive things that the young people in our group have done over the years and how it has just about now come together into a coherent framework. It’s to give you a chance to meet people that you wouldn’t normally and spark off ideas.

Visions of a Semantic (Molecular) Future

We are in the middle of several revolutions: Cloud computing; the Semantic Web; the Fourth Paradigm (data-driven science); web democracy; pervasive devices; citizen science; Open Knowledge. As never before individuals and small groups can change the world in months. Over 3 days we invite you to see what can happen in science and scholarship in the future, and to get actively involved.

This event (Jan 15-17 2011) consists of two components (please register for either/both separately):

2011-01-15/2011-01-16
Hackathon/Unconference. Over about a day-and-a-half we’ll build systems to support Open Semantic Knowledge. Anyone is welcome – you don’t have to be a “programmer”, just a burning desire to change the world and make things happen rapidly. There will also be tours of the University Library related to Open Bibliography.

2011-01-17 January We’ve invited visionary scientists and given them free rein to say where they think the semantic revolution is taking science. Robert Glen, Tom Blundell, Cameron Neylon, Henry Rzepa, Tony Hey, Alex Wade, John Wilbanks, Dan Zaharevitz, Douglas Kell, Peter Murray-Rust.

We’ll also be launching and demonstrating the semantic framework that our community has built and which includes the Unilever Centre, Cambridge University, The Blue Obelisk, Quixote-chem, The Open Knowledge Foundation and Climate Code.

We’ve been fortunate to have a very wide range of collaborators and funders including: Unilever, JISC, EPSRC, BBSRC, Microsoft, RSC, BMC, PLoS, IUCr, Nature, Symyx, Accelrys, IBM, EBI, EGU, British Library, UKPMC, many academic groups and many others and the event highlights the fruits of these.

The event looks forward (and PMR is not “retiring”). Scholarship (universities, research, teaching, publishing) has been slow to take up the opportunities of this digital century. This is an opportunity to identify and build the future.

Web page: http://www-ucc.ch.cam.ac.uk/news/peter-murray-rust-symposium-17th-january-2011