When you want to share data with others, the first thing you need to decide is under what terms. Do you want others be able just look at the data, change the format (Excel to CSV, for example)? Do you want this person to be allowed to share the data within his research group, or perhaps collaborators?

Very often this is arranged informally, in good faith, or by some consortium, confidentiality, or non-disclosure agreements. However, these approaches do not scale very well. When this matters, then data licenses are an alternative approach (not necessarily better!).

Madeleine Gray has written on her EUDat blog some words about the EUDAT License Wizard. This wizards talks you through the things you like to agree on, and in the end suggests a possible data license.

The big (non-science) news this week was the announcement that papers from a wide selection of Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals can now be shared allowing others without a subscription to read the paper (press release, news item). That is not Open Access to me (that requires the right to modify and redistribute modifications), but does remove the pay-wall and therefore speeding up dissemination. It depends on your perspective if this news is good or bad.

I previously wrote about the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) which has become a de facto standard for sharing data by web services. I personally still prefer something using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) because of its clear link to ontologies, but perhaps JSON-LD combines the best of both worlds.

The Open PHACTS API support various formats and this JSON is the default format used by the ops.js library.

Debugging is the process find removing a fault in your code (the etymology goes further back than the moth story, I learned today). Being able to debug is an essential programming skill, and being able to program flawlessly is not enough; the bug can be outside your own code. (...

Eating your own dog food is an rather useful concept in anything where a solution or product can change over time. This applies to science as much as programming. Even when we think things are static, they may not really be. This is often because we underestimate or are just ignorant against factors that influence the outcome. By repeatedly dogfooding, the expert will immediately recognize the effect of different influencing factors.

I think the authors of the Open PHACTS proposal made a right choice in defining a small set of questions that the solution to be developed could be tested against. The questions being specific, it is much easier to understand the needs. In fact, I suspect it may even be a very useful form of requirement analysis, and makes it hard to keep using vague terms.

Last week I gave an invited presentation in the nice library of the Royal Society of Chemistry, at the What's in a Name? The Unsung Heroes of Open Innovation: Nomenclature and Terminology meeting. I was asked to speak about HTML in this context, something I have worked with as channel for communication of scientific knowledge and data for almost 20 years know.

Chemistry students at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (then called the Catholic University of Nijmegen) got internet access in spring 1994. BTW, the catholic part only was reflected in the curriculum in that philosophy was an obligatory course. The internet access part meant a few things:

xblast HTML and web servers email Our university also had a campus-wide IT group that experimented with new technologies.

Our group organizes public Science Cafes where people from Maastricht University can see the research it is involved in. Yesterday it was my turn again, and I gave a presentation showing the BiGCaT and eNanoMapper Jenkins-CI installations (set up by Nuno) which I have been using for a variety of processes which Jenkins conveniently runs based on input it gets.

It seems had not posted my slides yet of the presentation at the 6th Open PHACTS community workshop. At this meeting I gave an overview of the Programming in the Life Sciences course we give to 2nd and 3rd year students of the Maastricht Science Programme (MSP; some participants graduated this summer, see the photo on the right side).
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