Chemistry Central Blog

Visions of a (Semantic) Molecular Future

A symposium that should appeal to the whole cheminformatics community takes place in Cambridge on 17th January. The event, entitled Visions of a (Semantic) Molecular Future, will celebrate the career of Peter Murray-Rust a Journal of Cheminformatics Editorial Board Member and a strong advocate of open data.

Peter has made great contributions to the field of semantic markup, and the symposium will include discussions from a number of scientists on where they think the semantic revolution is taking science. Among the panel of notable speakers, there will be presentations from Robert Glen, also on the Editorial Board of Journal of Cheminformatics, and Cameron Neylon, Editor-in-Chief of the recently announced BioMed Central journal Open Research Computation.

Monday’s symposium will be preceded by a two-day “hackfest” taking place over the weekend, which is based on the recent culture of “unconferences”. There are no set goals – in an unconference these are usually worked out on the day of the event – but participants will work together to build systems to support open semantic knowledge. These could include:

• Unilever Centre Open projects
• scraping and textmining of published knowledge,
• mash ups (Open chemistry and bioscience resources, bibliographies, government data, Linked Open Data).
• enhancement with geo-location and time-lines (“space-time”)
• computational frameworks (Lensfield, Quixote).
• Blue Obelisk mashups in chemistry
• toolkits for crowdsourcing.

This two-part event not only celebrates the career of Peter Murray-Rust, but more importantly it looks to build the future.

You can follow these events on Twitter: #pmrsymp, #pmrhack

Posted by Bailey Fallon at 11:53    Comments (0)