At a workshop in NESC, looking at data integration in the Neurosciences.

Very interesting talk from Maryann Martone. She showed a slightly depressing slide describing the aims of the various eScience projects which is basically interchangable between all projects — data heterogeneity, distribution, autonomy. Like other medical research projects that I have heard off, they spent nearly three years getting the data through the various ethical approval committees before they could even think about hosting the data. The requirement for anonymity is important, of course, but the cost is enormous. It's a pity that this effort can't be shared for different projects.

Neurobase presented an interesting architecture which looks very like ComparaGRID — they have a set of wrappers mapping into a common relational datamode; essentially ComparGRID does the same thing but with an OWL based model.

Well, I was a little bit worried about my talk, as the last time I tried it, it wasn't that good. But in the end, it went reasonably well, which was nice.

The Ontogenesis meeting was a good meeting — and only partly because I was enjoying doing research so much. There was lots of discussion on the softer aspects of ontology building. What metadata do we store about ontologies, how do we get information about of domain scientists and so on.

One slightly embarrasing thing happened — Andy Gibson refered to my talk during his, and then asked me a question about it. But I hadn't been listening, having written email most of the way through his talk. I have a good excuse: first, I'd trieda to rearrange the timetable and that had gone horribly wrong, as none of the students heard about it in time; and second I'd arranged for Keith to cover my practical session, but he ran over a dog and his bike and knocked himself about a bit. Even when I get let out for a bit, it seems teaching still has a hold on my attention.