3rd International Biocuration Conference in Berlin
Berlin Dahlem-Dorf tube station
I’m attending the 3rd International Biocuration Conference in Berlin, which looks like a pretty successful meeting in terms of numbers of participants. Seems like somewhere between 100 and 200 participants. It looks like the time for recognition for biocuration and curated biological resource has come. The International Society for Biocuration has been inaugurated yesterday. People from publishing companies such as Nature are attending.
Janet Thornton, director of EBI, gave the opening keynote yesterday evening, rehearsing some of the history of biocuration and looking into the future of securing funding for biocuration through the Elixir project.
I’m now listening to Philip Bourne talking about “Changes in Scholarly Communication and the Potential Impact on Biocuration”. He talks, beyond a lot of other things, about the author embedding semantic information into the orginal manuscript and introduces part of his own work with Microsoft on a plug-in for word to do this enrichment.
There is nothing overly particular about this meeting but it strenghens my feeling that we are at the point where finally the idea of preserving the information in the first place, in the scientific document, has come. Both Dietrich’s semantic enrichment conference as well as this one was well attended by publishers – Elsevier and Nature where at both. This scientific document can then become both a scientific article as well as one or many database entries.
Another notion that has come up a couple of times is the question of reward for authors to make and submit semantically rich documents. One of the ideas is fast-tracking those documents – publishing them faster.
Categorised as: Conferences and Meetings, Life of Chris, Open Data, Open Science, Open Standards, People, Publishing, Scientific Culture
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