Anyways, going to the Predictive Toxicology workshop, thanx to the bursary award I received from echeminfo (see Oxford, August 2010: eCheminfo Predictive ADME & Toxicology 2010 Workshop).

This afternoon I walked around a bit, watching all the old buildings. But I guess being here without anyone to share it with, and that it looks just like Cambridge, makes me not-so-much impressed. Moreover, it’s too busy with tourists and people randomly wearing Oxford University sweatshirts. Small and nice was the Museum of the History of Science, with some nice chemical pieces, like this one:

Buildings like the Radcliffe Camera are nice on the outside, but closed. Seems I have to become a fellow first. This is what it looked like today:

Quite interesting too was the Oxford University Press shop. I’m a sucker for books. Apparently, you can just write a book and publish it. For example, an extensive list of dictionaries on about anything… and since I have been writing several book chapters right now, perhaps this is actually an interesting route…

But the question is, of course, how long will we keep reading books… they’re the hamburgers of educational material… Kindle and alikes will soon drop in price, and cost some €30 euro. But e-book prices will have to drop too, and I still do not get why an e-book is more expensive than a paperback… (see Amazon, the Kindle edition is more expensive than the paperback??). But then again… they are rich, and I am not.

There was some recent talk about the fact that no one can be Open to the full. You either do Open Data or Open Source, and make a living from the rest. That’s where I nicely show I know bullocks of economics. I do BODR, CDK, … all Open, all for free.

OK. That’s a plus for Oxford… it makes you think about things. Perhaps there is something to morphogenetic fields…

The main thing I liked about this conference was the chance to meet fellow bloggers. I am not so much interested in why others blog, and generally not reading blogs about the scientific life. I have written up in the past why I blog, so read that . What does interest me is how we can enhance blogs to make them easier to aggregate, search through, retrieve data, etc, etc. What I’d like to be able to do is read a blog item, note that it is about topic I like, go of into Taverna or Bioclipse (possible via Ubiquity), and hit the get me that data blob button. Now, I don’t mind it being hidden behind a paper, being on Google Data, or whatever, I just want to simply hit that button.

Returning readers of this blog that semantic chemistry is something I have worked on in the past, but while Chemical blogspace has a nice people-blogged-about-this-molecule section, it has not really picked up. Main reason is, that people cannot or do not want to add semantic markup. Now, the one thing I like most of the conference discussions yesterday (the pub was too noisy for me to reasonably chat with anyone), was the proposal to use Ubiquity for adding these semantics. So, commands like addSechemticMarkup, convertSMILESIntoInChIKey, that sort of things… The cool thing here, is that it is blogging service independent. It works for anything inside Firefox, including wikis, email, knols, whatever. Now, one obstacle is that Ubiquity involves a command line; and we know how much people dislike command lines, but I’m sure they will come up with Guiquity. Actually, maybe this is the activities that Mike has been talking about…

Update: live coverage at Friend Feed .