Posts
Supporting Dataset Descriptions in the Life Sciences
On 5 April 2017 I gave a seminar talk given at the EBI about supporting dataset descriptions in the life sciences. These descriptions help others to find the dataset so that it can be reused.
Smart Descriptions & Smarter Vocabularies (SDSVoc) Report
In December 2016 I presented at the Smart Descriptions and Smarter Vocabularies workshop on the Health Care and Life Sciences Community Profile for describing datasets, and our validation tool (Validata). Presentations included below.
Shapeshifting LOD Cloud
A new version of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud has been produced and it shows quite a shift from the previous version. It is great to see the LOD cloud continue to grow both in scale and diversity.
Research Blog: Facilitating the discovery of public datasets
Google are doing some interesting work on making datasets, in particular scientific datasets, more discoverable with Schema.org markup. This is closely related to the bioschemas community project.
New Paper: Reproducibility with Administrative Data
Our journal article (Playford et al., 2016) looks at encouraging good practice to enable reproducible analysis of data analysis workflows. This is a result of a collaboration between social scientists and a computer scientist with the ADRC-Scotland.
ISWC 2016 Trip Report
It has now been almost two months since ISWC 2016 where I was the Resources Track chair with Marta Sabou. This has given me time to reflect on the conference, in between a hectic schedule of project meetings, workshops, conferences, and a PhD viva.
The most enjoyable part of the conference for me was the CoLD Workshop Debate on the State of Linked Data. The workshop organisers had arranged for six prominent proponents of the Linked Data to argue that we have failed and that Linked Data will die away.
HCLS Tutorial at SWAT4LS 2016
On 5 December 2016 I presented a tutorial (Gray, Dumontier and Marshall, 2016) on the Heath Care and Life Sciences Community Profile (HCLS Datasets) at the 9th International Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences Conference (SWAT4LS 2016). Below you can find the slides I presented.
Celebrating 50 years of Computer Science at HWU
Display of old equipment used within computer science.
This year sees a double celebration in the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University – it is 50 years since we launched the first BSc Computer Science degree in Scotland, and 50 years since Heriot-Watt was granted university status. To celebrate we had a series of events last week including an open day and dinner for former staff and students.
During the open day we had a variety of displays and activities to highlight the current research taking place in the department. There was a display of some of the old equipment that has been used in the department. While this mostly focused on storage mediums, it also included my first computer – a BBC model B. Admittedly there was a lot of games played on it in my youth.
Will the real Kevin Macleod please line up?
Last week I attended the Digitising Scotland Project Colloquium at Raasay House (featured image above) on the Isle of Raasay. The colloquium was a gathering of historians and computer scientists to discuss the challenges of linking the vital records of the people of Scotland between 1851 and 1974.
HCLS Community Profile for Dataset Descriptions
My latest publication (Dumontier et al., 2016) describes the process followed in developing the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) community profile for dataset descriptions which was published last year. The diagram below provides a summary of the data model for describing datasets which covers 61 metadata terms drawn from 18 vocabularies.
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About Me
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. My research focuses on linking datasets. Read more