Category Archives: Uncategorized

(I’m afraid I’m going to bang on again about access to data). I’ve been at the CNI and the NSF/JISC meeting for which I wrote a position paper. The meeting was on Digital Repositories and Data-driven Scholarship (Science). My paper … Continue reading →

I’ve been offline for ca. 2 days – staying in a hotel which dates from the days of Mae West (she stayed there) but where the internet only works in one place if you hide under the bed. The closing … Continue reading →

Ben Litchfield is the(?) current guru of PDFBox and has updated me on  PDFBox. (I copy it here as although I think Jim has fixed the Blog (thanks, Jim)  I won’t take chances.) Name: Ben Litchfield URI: http://www.pdfbox.org/ | IP: 170.37.224.2 … Continue reading →

I blogged recently about how I used PDFBox to turn chemical theses (in hamburger PDF) into text. I have now found some interesting (and I think exciting) developments – but I’d like a reality check. I downloaded a thesis from … Continue reading →

Another snippet from ChemBark some months ago but highly relevant News Story of 2006: The Rise of the Chemical Blogosphere I have no doubt that the chemical blogosphere is here to stay and adds important new directions. I said this … Continue reading →

I am trying to get my past blog-stuff sorted out – some of my unpublishined snippets may appear in random order. I had selected Chem-Bark’s post: Chemical Citizen of 2006: Wikipedia User “V8rik” where CB lauds the contributions from “V8rik”. … Continue reading →

Software development is hard. Tedious. Frustrating. It usually takes much longer than anyone, including the author, thinks. So what tools and philosophy are useful to the solo – or near-solo – Open Source programmer? Here are some thoughts which  you’re … Continue reading →

The C20th saw the rise and value of scientific data aggregators – organisation who extracted data from the literature, cleaned it, packaged it and offered it for re-use. In some cases they got grants to support this, but most moved … Continue reading →

We have been working on a general, fluid, concept which we labelled “World Wide Molecular Matrix” – starting about 2001. (We actually put in a grant application under that name to the then new UK eScience programme – it didn’t … Continue reading →

Having blogged about the excitement of automatic reading and semantic enhancement of chemical theses I come to the startk reality of PDF. “Turning PDF into XML is like turning a hamburger back into a cow” (anon). So I searched for … Continue reading →