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SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) is a Web-based collaborative program that aims to organize and annotate scientific knowledge about Alzheimer disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Its goal is to facilitate the formation, development and testing of hypotheses about the disease. The ultimate goal of this project is to create tools and resources to manage the evolving universe of data and information about AD in such a way that researchers can easily comprehend their larger context ("what hypothesis does this support or contradict?"), compare and contrast hypotheses ("where do these two hypotheses agree and disagree?"), identify unanswered questions and synthesize concepts and data into ever more comprehensive and useful hypotheses and treatment targets for this disease. The SWAN project is designed to allow the community of AD researchers to author, curate and connect a diversity of data and ideas about AD via secure personal and public SWAN workspaces, using the emerging Semantic Web paradigm for deep interconnection of data, information and knowledge. We are initially focusing on developing a fully public Web resource deployed as part of the Alzheimer Research Forum web site (www.alzforum.org). After the public resource has been launched, we will also develop secure personal workspaces (MySWAN) and semi-private lab workspaces (LabSWAN). An essential component of this project is development of an initial, core knowledge base within SWAN, which will provide immediate value to researchers at the time of deployment. This is a critically important part of our strategy to ensure that the SWAN system gains wide adoption and active participation by the AD research community. As part of our development strategy, we are also recruiting a "beta test" community of AD researchers to enter their own hypotheses, add commentaries and citations, and provide feedback on the technology and content. SWAN is being developed by a collaborative team from

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

The AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition is a network of scientific organizations that recognizes a role for science and scientists in efforts to realize human rights. Composed of scientific associations, societies and academies, as well as individual scientists, the Coalition aims to facilitate communication and partnerships on human rights within and across scientific communities, and between these and human rights communities. The Coalition's programs are being carried out by the following five working groups: 1. Welfare of Scientists 2. Science Ethics and Human Rights 3. Service to the Scientific Community 4. Service to the Human Rights Community 5. Education and Information Resources The Coalition is also pursuing a joint initiative to realize the human right to "the benefits of scientific progress" (Article 15, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

The myGrid team produce and use a suite of tools designed to "help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists". The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as biology, social science, music, astronomy, text mining and chemistry. The tools have been adopted by a large number of projects and institutions. The team has developed tools and infrastructure to allow: * the design, editing and execution of workflows in Taverna * the sharing of workflows and related data by myExperiment * the cataloguing and annotation of services in BioCatalogue and Feta * the creation of user-friendly rich clients such as UTOPIA

his meeting was about "Making the Web Work for Science and the Impact of e-Science and the Cyberinfrastructure." I provided an overview of how access to information has changed over the past 20 years for me. I talked about the challenges for publishers serving the chemistry community and how their business models are being challenged and how I empathize with the struggle to figure out how to deal with it. I talked about quality and how care must be taken when using information online. We are ALL challenged with errors - whether you consider PubChem, ChemSpider, Wikipedia or any of the other online databases they all have errors - how do you find them? Some of them are obvious and I pointed to obvious examples in the talk. I hoped to educate the attendees in regards to the value of InChI which, while not a perfect fit yet, is a great start to structure-based communication of chemistry. I publicly blessed the efforts of publishers such as the RSC and Nature Publishing group for the efforts they are making to support InChI and improve the quality of document presentation online. I blessed CAS as a treasure trove of information and the gold standard of curated chemistry. We need them all to be successful for the sake of our science. The challenge is how to fit into the ongoing proliferation of free access to information without modifying the business models.

UCSF Chimera is a highly extensible program for interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, including density maps, supramolecular assemblies, sequence alignments, docking results, trajectories, and conformational ensembles. High-quality images and animations can be generated. Chimera includes complete documentation and several tutorials, and can be downloaded free of charge for academic, government, non-profit, and personal use. Chimera is developed by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics and funded by the NIH National Center for Research Resources (grant P41-RR01081).

SciPy (pronounced "Sigh Pie") is open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering. It is also the name of a very popular conference on scientific programming with Python. The SciPy library depends on NumPy, which provides convenient and fast N-dimensional array manipulation. The SciPy library is built to work with NumPy arrays, and provides many user-friendly and efficient numerical routines such as routines for numerical integration and optimization. Together, they run on all popular operating systems, are quick to install, and are free of charge. NumPy and SciPy are easy to use, but powerful enough to be depended upon by some of the world's leading scientists and engineers. If you need to manipulate numbers on a computer and display or publish the results, give SciPy a try!

BioMart is a query-oriented data management system developed jointly by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OiCR) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The system can be used with any type of data and is particularly suited for providing 'data mining' like searches of complex descriptive data. BioMart comes with an 'out of the box' website that can be installed, configured and customised according to user requirements. Further access is provided by graphical and text based applications or programmatically using web services or API written in Perl and Java. BioMart has built-in support for query optimisation and data federation and in addition can be configured to work as a DAS 1.5 Annotation server. The process of converting a data source into BioMart format is fully automated by the tools included in the package. Currently supported RDBMS platforms are MySQL, Oracle and Postgres. BioMart is completely Open Source, licensed under the LGPL, and freely available to anyone without restrictions.

Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don't matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share.

GenBioWiki is the student home page for the Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology (GBCB) program at Virginia Tech. Bioinformatics and computational biology provide a research platform to acquire, manage, analyze, and display large amounts of data, which in turn catalyze a systems approach to understanding biological organisms, as well as making useful predictions about their behavior in response to environmental and other perturbations. Moreover, bioinformatics is the study of biological systems and large biological data sets using analytical methods borrowed from computer science, mathematics, statistics, and the physical sciences. This transdisciplinary approach to research requires graduates with extensive cross-cultural professional and technical training and provides ample employment opportunities for Ph.D. graduates. [1]

Eggdrop is the world's most popular Open Source IRC bot, designed for flexibility and ease of use, and is freely distributable under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Eggdrop was originally developed by Robey Pointer; however, he no longer works on Eggdrop so please do not contact him for help solving a problem or bug. Some features of Eggdrop: * Designed to run on Linux, *BSD, SunOs, Windows, Mac OS X, etc ... * Extendable with Tcl scripts and/or C modules * Support for the big five IRC networks (Undernet, DALnet, EFnet, IRCnet, and QuakeNet) * The ability to form botnets and share partylines and userfiles between bots Some benefits of Eggdrop: * The oldest IRC bot still in active development (Eggdrop was created in 1993) * Established IRC help channels and web sites dedicated to Eggdrop * Thousands of premade Tcl scripts and C modules * Best of all ... It's FREE!

Welcome to the Gene Wiki portal. This portal is dedicated to the goal of applying community intelligence to the annotation of gene and protein function. The Gene Wiki is an informal collection of pages on human genes and proteins, and this effort to develop these pages is tightly coordinated with the Molecular and Cellular Biology Wikiproject. Our specific aims are summarized as follows: * To provide a well written and informative Wikipedia article for every notable human gene * To invite participation by interested lay editors, students, professionals, and academics from around the world * To integrate Gene Wiki articles with existing Wikipedia content through the use of internal wiki links increasing the value of both Please browse around the Gene Wiki, make an edit to your favorite gene page, and feel free to ask questions!

The advent of the World Wide Web has led to an explosion in the number of diverse resources available to neuroscientists. Despite the availability of powerful search engines, locating these diverse resources has become increasingly difficult and time consuming. The NIF project utilizes both advanced machine-based search technologies and old-fashioned human legwork to provide access to neuroscience-relevant resources on the Web. Resources include research materials, Web pages, software tools, data sets, literature and general information. The NIF has developed technologies that allow a user to search across these different types of resources, all from a single interface. A unique feature of the NIF is the ability to issue direct queries against multiple databases simultaneously, retrieving content that is largely hidden from traditional search engines. A second unique feature is an extensive vocabulary covering major neuroscience domains for describing and searching these resources. The NIF takes advantage of advances in knowledge engineering to broaden and refine searches based on related concepts. The NIF beta test site was developed to gain feedback on the NIF search interface and content. Users will be asked to search the NIF, explore the vocabularies, and answer a questionnaire about their experience.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F is a non profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The foundation grew out of the volunteer projects BioPerl, BioJava and BioPython and was formally incorporated in order to handle our modest requirements of hardware ownership, domain name management and funding for conferences and workshops.The Foundation does not participate directly in the development or structure of the open source work, but as the members of the foundation are drawn from the member projects, there is clear commonality of direction and purpose. Occasionally the O|B|F directors may make announcements about our direction or purpose (a recent one was on the licensing of academic software) when the board feels there is a need to clarify matters, but in general we prefer to remain simply the administrative support organization for our member projects. Our main activities are: * Underwriting and supporting the BOSC conferences * Organizing and supporting developer-centric "hackathon" events * Managing our servers, colocation facilities, bank account & other assets We are incorporated in the state of Delaware, USA as a not-for-profit company.

What is WebcamStudio? Your own TV studio in your computer for broadcasting thru a virtual webcam. Mix multiple video source as webcams, movies, images, your desktop and log in your prefered video streaming site like Stikam or BlogTV and start your own show or video blog with: - Cool Special Effects - Text overlay - Video Source transition/rotation/movement... - Animations and Faces! - A webcam at your own image See the features! Why for GNU/Linux? Because there are no solution for Linux and Windows users already have acces to this kind of software. And mostly because I use a lot of Linux technologies that are not available under Microsoft Windows. (Sorry guys!) Based on... * Gstreamer libraries and plugins * gstreamer-java libraries * Java 6 (from Sun)

OpenCV is an open source computer vision library originally developed by Intel. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library is cross-platform, and runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It focuses mainly towards real-time image processing, as such, if it finds Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives on the system, it will use these commercial optimized routines to accelerate itself. This implementation is not a complete port of OpenCV. Currently, this library supports : * real-time capture * video file import * basic image treatment (brightness, contrast, threshold, …) * object detection (face, body, …) * blob detection Future versions will include more advanced functions such as motion analysis, object and color tracking, multiple OpenCV object instances … For more information about OpenCV visit the Open Source Computer Vision Library Intel webpage, the OpenCV Library Wiki, and the OpenCV Reference Manual (pdf).

CloudBurst: Highly Sensitive Short Read Mapping with MapReduce Michael Schatz Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland Next-generation DNA sequencing machines are generating an enormous amount of sequence data, placing unprecedented demands on traditional single-processor read mapping algorithms. CloudBurst is a new parallel read-mapping algorithm optimized for mapping next-generation sequence data to the human genome and other reference genomes, for use in a variety of biological analyses including SNP discovery, genotyping, and personal genomics. It is modeled after the short read mapping program RMAP, and reports either all alignments or the unambiguous best alignment for each read with any number of mismatches or differences. This level of sensitivity could be prohibitively time consuming, but CloudBurst uses the open-source Hadoop implementation of MapReduce to parallelize execution using multiple compute nodes. CloudBurst's running time scales linearly with the number of reads mapped, and with near linear speedup as the number of processors increases. In a 24-processor core configuration, CloudBurst is up to 30 times faster than RMAP executing on a single core, while computing an identical set of alignments. In a large remote compute clouds with 96 cores, CloudBurst reduces the running time from hours to mere minutes for typical jobs involving mapping of millions of short reads to the human genome. CloudBurst is available open-source as a model for parallelizing other bioinformatics algorithms with MapReduce.