[Biojava-l] Biotechnology group?

[Ewan Birney]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Eric Neumann wrote:

> 
> Tim Clark (MPI), Arkesh Mehta (BIO), Norm Walsh (Sun), myself, and a few others
> are working together to develop  a roadmap defining our goals and activities
> over the near to long term. Much of this should become public in the near
> future. I see this initiative as a means to help utilize and coordinate the
> ideas/specifications/tools advanced by other life science informatics groups. We
> hope to have a presentation during the combined BOSC/BioPathways satellite
> workshop at ISMB in Copenhagen this July, but details still need to be worked
> out.


My hope is Eric is that groups like this are focused on capturing and
tracking "best practice" or - if not best - "common practice" amongst
bioinformatics groups worldwide and provide a useful framework such then
when two groups want to agree on a well-defined bioinformatics idea then
they can just point to a document/XMI/DTD/IDL/DDL/whatever and say "like
that"


The mistake I think lots of us have made (myself included) is to design
without seeing your design meet real data/problems. A particular mistake
we are all fond of is jumping onto new technologies as if they will solve
long standing semantic issues - invariable they dont ;)


In other words, I think standards in bioinformatics should be a "behind
the wave" type activity, not surfing the wave.


Good luck to you guys and I look forward to seeing you at BOSC...


ewan