After weeks of not much of interest happening, there was a flury of activity today on the Semantic Web for Life Sciences mailing list. This was largely the fault of Alan Ruttenberg who used the two words which on their own are most likely to cause an argument between bioinformaticians — "identifier" and "standard".

How depressing it is that we are still having these discussions after so much has been achieved. Bioinformatics will use a standard when it suits them; people have been active in using GO or MGED. Identifiers, however, still remain a problem.