Now that I have wrote out the goals, what they students will practically do, and how to get started with the Open PHACTS platform, I will list how we will assess the students:

The purpose of a web service is that you give it a question or task, and that it returns an answer. For example, we can ask the Open PHACTS platform what compounds it knows with aspirin in the name. We pass the question (with the API key) and get a list of matching compounds. Now, this communication is complex: it happens at many levels, which are spelled out in the Internet Model.

I have outlined the scope of the six-day course: the students will learn to program while hacking on the Open PHACTS’ Linked Data API (LDA). The first step is to get an account for the LDA. I have already done that to save time. But these are the steps to take.

Our department will soon start the course Programming in the Life Sciences for a group of some 10 students from the Maastricht Science Programme. This is the first time we give this course, and over the next weeks I will be blogging about this course. First, some information.

Update : Mark wrote up a blog post on the RDF that the ChEMBL team itself. Yesterday, the paper “The ChEMBL database as linked open data” (doi:10.1186/1758-2946-5-23) by Andra Waagmeester (@andrawaag), Ola Spjuth (@ola_spjuth), Peter Ansell (@p_ansell), Antony Williams (@chemconnector), Valery Tkachenko, Janna Hastings, Bin Chen (@binchenindiana), David J Wild (@davidjohnwild), and me appeared in the OA JChemInf journal.

Spjuth, O.; Carlsson, L.; Alvarsson, J.; Georgiev, V.; Willighagen, E.; Eklund, M. Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 2012, 12, 1980-1986. Yeah, that looks like what I asked for :) Thanx, and well done!

The “Emerging practices for mapping and linking life sciences data using RDF” (doi:10.1016/j.websem.2012.02.003) is now available online, where I contributed a section on the original workflow for creating ChEMBL triples, and contributed to the section about open licensing, referring to CCZero and the Panton Principles. Happy reading!

Update : this work is now described in this paper . Last week, ChEMBL 13 was released, with even more data, data fixes, etc. Since my RDF for ChEMBL 09 my workflow has become more solid and uses more common ontologies, started using more common ontologies and ontologies I just like, such as CHEMINF and CiTO.

Readers of my blog know I have been using the Citation Typing Ontology, CiTO (doi:10.1186/2041-1480-1-S1-S6). I allows me to see how the CDK is cited and used . CiteULike is currently adding more CiTO more functionality, which they started doing almost one and a half years ago.

Six month was not quite the amount of time I anticipated between the third and fourth edition, but I finally managed to upload edition 1.4.7-0 of my Groovy Cheminformatics book. The first three editions sold 37 copies, including two for myself. Enough to feel supported and to continue working on it.

The Oscar4 paper (CC-BY, just like the screenshots of the paper below) was out already some days now, but the formatting has finished: