Went to an interesting workshop on EPSRC's LSI programme. One of the interesting things which came out of this, is that most people who actually have LSI funding are not aware of the fact.
I was a bit surprised about this. So were the people in charge of the LSI. However, they later admitted that the main reason for this was probably that they had made a strategic decision not to tell people when they got funding.
The Semantic Enrichment workshop has left me thinking about the presentation of science. The thesis or long dissertation of post-graduate courses, is surely one of the oddities of the scientific education system. If you read "Origin of the Species", and other literature of the time, with its slow, gentlemanly meanderings, then then, perhaps, it makes sense. But, in this day and age, almost no scientific research is publishing in long-hand, book form. Everything happens in the papers. Even our books are normally a collection of papers.
So, why do we force PhD students to write a thesis? It clearly is not the best training for what is to come after.
Was at a workshop on Semantic Enrichment of the Literature. There were a combination of text miners, ontologists and publishers. It was a pretty interesting meeting; however, there was a lack of coherence. The problem is, at the moment, there are too many interacting possibilities of the way scientific publishing could develop, and too many requirements. The big issues that I can see are:
Electronic publishing give us enormous possibilities, of which we have barely touched the surface. Should we go "wiki", should we enable annotation of papers after publication, and, if so, how do we maintain the provenance the literature curation that we have at the moment. High throughput means that we are suffering from a — data deluge, tsunami, insert your meteorological metaphor here — means that we have to support computational amenability. Finally, the open access movement offers the possibility that we can investigate these issues, while leaving the raw data free for the future and, frankly, without having to constantly wait for the lawyers and finance people to catch up.
Each of these issues are complex enough, in and off themselves. But combine all of them together—well, it's unsurprising that we lack coherence.