Wikiomics is an open documentation initiative in the field of bioinformatics and systems biology.
Wikiomics consists in a free space for storing and sharing information that joins together practical and theoretical aspects of bioinformatics. Anyone can initiate or modify an article at Wikiomics and use it as a collection of notes, links and papers on a specific problem. Page history and email notification make it easy to track changes made by other users of this wiki.
Nature has launched a new companion weblog for it's Nature Genetics journal. The blog is called Free Association. I see this as a significant move for Nature and science publications in general.
Although I have experience my usual irony in seeing these types of technologies (blogs, RSS etc.) being adopted in science. The irony being that the science community is always behind when it comes to the cutting edge of communications technology developed on the web. Or maybe it is just more science infotainment. I suspect not given that the added commentary might be a good way to keep up on Nature's advance online publications.
I've added a bit of stuff to the Nodalpoint wiki of late: some notes on using iprscan + OpenPBS and installing Manatee on Debian are the latest.
Just to remind you that the Wiki link is at the top right of this page and all registered users can contribute. I know that writing an article is a lot of work but if everyone contributed one item, we'd have a great source of documentation.
The Nodalpoint "usual suspects" are dealing with sad news from the University of New South Wales, which I think is worthy of announcement.
iSpecies is a test of E O Wilson's idea of a web page for each species. The data displayed are generated "on the fly" by querying other data sources
This news via Lost Boy (a.k.a. Leigh Dodds, who works at science publisher Ingenta). The iSpecies search engine was written by Rod Page (who wrote the LSID plugin for Firefox, see here). What is interesting about this "mash-up" is how the web pages are produced. Distributed web services such as Yahoo Image search, NCBI's EUtils, and Google Scholar (a scraper in this case) are used in creating each page, for example lion.
What is also cool is that each species has RDF formated metadata associated with it via an LSID, see here for an example. It would be nice if each species had its own permanent URL, which would be arguably more useful than an LSID, but I won't go there :)
Expect to see more of distributed web services integration in bioinformatics, as Lincoln predicted, everyone ignored and will now think is great !
Two LIMS (-like) software that may be of interest to many groups.
LabStoRe
LabStoRe is a web-based (PHP/MySQL) stocks/inventory and records storage/management/tracking system that has been released recently. It is modular and, optionally, user-account based.
OrderSys
OrderSys is a 'similar' software for an purchase ordering system. Often, laboratories and research groups place supply orders through a central (like a departmental) office. This software generates 'order forms' for that purpose. The database holds vendor information, item information, order history, etc., and is useful not just for placing orders but also to track them, and for budgeting, etc.
Visit the sites to know more, for screenshots, etc.
Firstly if you don't know what podcasting is let me catch you up. To understand podcasting you first need to understand RSS; podcasting is simply a way of putting links to audio files in an RSS feed. The audio files are usually amateur radio broadcasts (or free form audio blog posts if you like) that are then downloaded as the RSS feed is updated by your podcasting aware RSS client. Yeah, I don't know what all the fuss is about either ?
Anyway now podcasting has been picked up by Nature, for more see this post via Notes from the Biomass. Another logical extension: academic lectures are being released as podcasts (via Eastern Blot, time to update the reading list).
Sean Eddy answers the first question in a short Nature article. It is a gentle introduction and worth the read if you've heard the words hidden Markov model and been too lazy to make the effort to understand them. Flags n' lollipops has a nice short tutorial on Support Vector Machines that answers the latter.
Are you teaching in the bioscience field? Did you ever want to put your lecture online but did not know how? Did you ever want to let your students put together projects online but did not have the means to do so? Are you looking for a site to start your own, bioscience related blog? BioScienceCourses.org may just be the site for you.
As you will see, the site right now is nearly empty. That's what community driven sites are when there is no community yet! So join on in, contribute content and ideas and become part of BioScienceCourses.org
