MetaboEU2020 in Toulouse and the ELIXIR Metabolomics Community assemblies

This week I attended the European RFMF Metabomeeting 2020, aka #MetaboEU2020, held in Toulouse. Originally, I had hoped to do this by train, but that turned out unfeasible. Co-located with this meeting where ELIXIR Metabolomics Community meetings. We're involved in two implementation studies for together less than a month of work. But both this community and the conference are great places to talk about WikiPathways, BridgeDb (our website is still disconnected from the internet), and cheminformatics.

Toulouse was generally great. It comes with its big city issues, like fairly expensive hotels, and a very frequent public transport system. It also had a great food market where we had our "gala dinner". Toulouse is also home to Airbus, so it was hard to miss the Beluga:

The MetaboEU2020 conference itself had some 400 participants, of course, with a lot of wet lab metabolomics. As a chemist, with a good pile of training in analytical chemistry, it's great to see the progress. From a data analysis perspective, the community has a long way to come. We're still talking about known known, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. The posters were often cryptic, e.g. stating they found 35 interesting metabolites, without actually listing them. The talks were also really interesting.

Now, if you read this, there is a good chance you were not at the meeting. You can check the above linked hashtag for coverage on Twitter, but we can do better. I loved Lanyrd, but their business model was not scalable and the service no longer exists. But Scholia (see doi:10.3897/rio.5.e35820) could fill the gap (it uses the Wikidata RDF and SPARQL queries). I followed Finn's steps and created a page for the meeting and started associated speakers (I've done this in the past for other meetings too):

Finn also created proceedings pages in the past, which I also followed. So, I asked people on Twitter to post their slidedeck and posters on Figshare or Zenodo, and so far we ended up with 10 "proceedings" (thanks to everyone who did!!!):

As you can see, there is an RSS feed which you can follow (e.g. with Feedly) to get updates if more materials appears online! I wish all conferences did this!

Oh, one of the posters is the semantic web work by Denise on integrating content of WikiPathways with enzyme kinetics data. Work in progress, but release soon, release often.