The 1.5 day hackathon prequel to the SWAT4LS workshop was a great success – at least all the 30+ people there thought so. This is just a brief report and thanks. First enormous thanks to Andrea Splendiani and Mahendra Mahey (JISC) who jointly came up with the idea. And JISC who sponsored the event. Thanks to Jenny Molloy (OKFN) who spent a lot of time preparing and advertising and to everyone who contributed (i.e. everyone)
Very briefly we started with an evening session where people presented ideas – some prepared (Professor OWL showed her video) so extempore. Ideas about our ORR interests (Open Citations (David Shotton and Tanya Gray), Open Bibliography, and patient centred information and decisions (Gilles Frydman and Graham Steel)). But also how to build networks of gene-drug interactions, design an artificial genome, map the incidence of disease, etc.).
Then next day Mahendra gently organized us into groups – about 6 critical masses or people who felt they could create something by the end of the day. Not necessarily software – it could be exploration, resources, specs, etc. Mahendra, Naomi Lillie (recently joined OKF staff) and I had a roving brief interviewing tables, people and generally recording the event.
I have recently discovered the joys of video recording and since Mahendra’s was full I rushed out to Tottenham Court Road for a tripod. We started to record individual attendees and find out who, why, what, etc. ULU isn’t the easiest place to record as it’s got large echoing rooms and passages, banging doors, people with drills, police cars, and students shrieking with laughter. So some of the early efforts were poor quality. Mahendra has a colleague who can apparently work magic and he’s taken them all away to edit. But anyway at lunchtime I rushed out again and got a lapel mike and spare card and here we are. Here I’ll just put stills from the movies. But I am very impressed with the quality – you can often see every word on the screen.
[Sorry I don’t have names for everyone – feel free to annotate through blog comments]
Graham McDawg, Gilles KosherFrog and Jenny Molloy
Building an artificial genome
The BibSoup cluster (anticlockwise) : XX, Naomi Lillie, Tania Gray, Mark McGillivray, Jenny Molloy, Gilles Frydman, Graham Steel
BibSoup being presented (Jenny Molloy)
The details [there was also a great demo on screen by Mark – I’ll post it when transcoded)
Soup of the evening, beautiful BibSoup
McDawg – stand back – I’m a scientist
David Shotton (middle rear, beard) and others
I am really excited about the whole thing – the different disciplines and experiences really came together. There was a lot of interest in Open Bibliography and Citations and BibSoup. These can become central tools in the semantic web – and when allied with UKPMC they specifically serve bioscience. The disease theme was very strong – not just our group. And great interest in patient-centred approaches.
More on all this later.
Great depiction and overview of the event.
One item that I touched upon with Peter before the event started was “Remodelling the regulation of postmodern innovation in medicine” Price et al 2005. A copy of this can be found at the following url:-
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2920295/Price-remodelmedicine-2005.pdf
Whilst this Price et al in itself is not related to the semantic web, it’s an important piece of work that is well worth reading.
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