Posts
Schema.org Dataset Descriptions Meeting
On Monday 16 May, several interested individuals (including myself) from ELIXIR, bioCADDIE, Bioschemas and the W3C HCLS Community Profile met with representatives from Google involved in the schema.org activity on describing datasets.
Finding datasets, and understanding their content, is a challenging task for humans and currently not possible to automate. Schema.org is an initiative from the major web search engines to help with the discovery of web resource.
Outstanding Reviewer
I’ve been recognised as an outstanding reviewer in 2015 for the Journal of Web Semantics. You can see full details of my reviewing history on my reviewer profile page.
ISWC 2016 Deadlines Approaching
ISWC 2016 will be taking place in Kobe, Japan from 17-21 October. Tomorrow is the deadline for abstract submissions for ISWC, with full papers due on 30 April. There are three tracks for you to submit to:
The FAIR Principles herald more open, transparent, and reusable scientific data
Today, March 15 2016, the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship were formally published in the Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Data. The problem the FAIR Principles address is the lack of widely shared, clearly articulated, and broadly applicable best practices around the publication of scientific data. While the history of scholarly publication in journals is long and well established, the same cannot be said of formal data publication. Yet, data could be considered the primary output of scientific research, and its publication and reuse is necessary to ensure validity, reproducibility, and to drive further discoveries. The FAIR Principles address these needs by providing a precise and measurable set of qualities a good data publication should exhibit – qualities that ensure that the data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).
Open PHACTS is dead, long live Open PHACTS!
I have spent the last five years working on the Open PHACTS project which is sadly at an end. However it is not the end of the Open PHACTS drug discovery platform. We have transitioned to a new era of a foundation organisation running and developing the platform. The milestone was marked by the symbolic handover of the Open PHACTS flag (see photo of on the right Barend Mons (Leiden Medical Center) and Gerhard Ecker (University of Vienna) handing the flag to on the left Stefan Senger (GlaxoSmithKline), Derek Marren (Eli Lilly), and Herman van Vlijmen (Janssen Pharmaceutica).
Open PHACTS Closing Symposium
For the last 5 years I have had the pleasure of working with the Open PHACTS project. Sadly, the project is now at an end. To celebrate we are having a two day symposium to look over the contributions of the project and its future legacy.
Validata: An online tool for testing RDF data conformance
Validata is an online web application for validating an RDF document against a set of constraints. This is useful for data exchange applications or ensuring conformance of an RDF dataset against a community agreed standard. Constraints are expressed as a Shape Expression (ShEx) schema. Validata extends the ShEx functionality to support multiple requirement levels. Validata can be repurposed for different deployments by providing it with a new ShEx schema.
MACS Christmas Conference
I was asked to speak at the School (Faculty) of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (MACS) Christmas conference. I decided I would have some fun with the presentation.
Title: Project X
A short project on linking course data from Sharing and learning
During the summer my colleague Phil Barker (author of the Sharing and Learning blog) and I hosted a summer intern, Anna Grant.
Anna’s project was to investigate the feasibility of publishing the data about our courses as Linked Data. Phil subsequently wrote up a blog post about the work which I have been meaning to share for a long time, so here it is; long overdue.
Crusade for Big Data Keynote
Today I gave the keynote presentation (slides below) at the Crusade for Big Data in the AAL domain workshop as part of the EU Ambient Assisted Living Forum. I gave an overview of the way that the Open PHACTS project has overcome various Big Data challenges to provide a production quality data integration platform that is being used to answer real pharmacology business questions.
subscribe via RSS
About Me
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. My research focuses on linking datasets. Read more