Bil Lewis Works With Biologists…

…and occasionally finds it frustrating.

Data Provenance Challenge

John’s summary of our discussion about what to teach scientists about reproducible research if they already believe it’s a good thing, and want to start doing it reminded me that I never posted about the Provenance Challenge. It has been run twice so far; each time, authors of tools to track the provenance (or lineage) of scientific data have to implemented some workflows, then answers questions about where data came from, what was done to it, and so on.  The results of the first challenge are described system-by-system in these papers (sorry, but it’s behind a wall — if you google for combinations of the authors’ names, you can find PDF preprints).  This is a very cool research area, and I hope one of my incoming grad students will want to do something with it.

SciFoo, eGY, and Splitting

1. OpenWetware has posted notes from SciFoo. I’m sorry I missed it; looking forward to “Science in the 21st Century” even more than before.
2. Those notes pointed me at the Electronic Geophysical Year declaration. I agree in principle, but think that something like the Open Source Initiative’s “certified open” badge would be more useful than UN-ish statements like, “Effort should be made to identify and rescue critical Earth system data and ensure persistent access to them.”
3. We’re very close to re-launching the Software Carpentry site as a wiki, and I’m wondering if I should move the science-and-computing thread out of this blog into a separate one at that site.  Thoughts?

They’re Breeding Like Rabbits

Cameron Neylon complains about the proliferation of networking sites, aggregators, and what-not for scientists. I think he’s right: none of them will succeed until there’s massive consolidation.  Maybe LinkedIn or someone like that could offer a cheap-but-not-free service customized to scientists’ need on top of its existing infrastructure?