The launch of the Virtual Human Platform

Nine days ago, the VHP4Safety project (see these posts) held a launch event in Utrecht for the Virtual Human Platform (VHP), a key result of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA, from the Dutch Nationale Wetenschapsagenda). Despite the name, the NWA is just one part of the NWO funding mechanisms, but like the NWO Open Science programme it is funding with a specific purpose. And the purpose of the NWA is to answer research and societal questions that the Dutch people together defined and a public consultation (many years ago). VHP4Safety is answering to one of those questions. 4 minute read

New paper: pyBiodatafuse: Extending interoperability of data using modular queries across biomedical resources

The number of data and knowledge source relevant to your biological or chemical question increases every year. They all come with different API and different data models. These need to be documented and mapped. What better way to do that than actually do that and then use that. I never asked, but I can imagine that was the original idea of Tooba and Yojana. At the very least, it demonstrates the level of interoperability we need in the life sciences. 1 minute read

FAIR Implementation Profiles: Chemistry

I have had this on my todo list for way too long: writing about FAIR Implementation Profiles, or FIPs for short (see also doi:10.1007/978-3-030-65847-2_13): 2 minute read

One Million IUPAC names #5: a new approach and 400k names

About fifteen months ago a new project started: One Million IUPAC names: 4 minute read

Open Science Festival Limburg

One of the things I have been busy with in the past weeks (besides contributing to grant proposals) is the organization of the June 11-12 Open Science Festival Limburg! Open Science Festivals provide a great platform to talk science in an open way, with people that all find reuse of science more important. The creativity present at such events is just so energizing. less than 1 minute read

CiTO annotations with Zotero 8 and Google Docs

This is a bit of work I did already in March, but with the Zotero 9 release I was reminded that I wanted to blog this. Ideally, it will trigger some further discussion and maybe a future Zotero/Google Docs version supports bibliography-level annotations too. less than 1 minute read

SWAT4HCLS 2026

A bit over a week ago, SWAT4HCLS 2026 took place, with the matching biohackathon on Thursday (see this post. I attempted a bit of live coverage on mastodon: day 1 and day 2. But it seems the semantic web community interested in SWAT4HCLS has not found the fediverse yet. So, make sure to check this full list of abstracts. 2 minute read