W3C Workshop

I learned of this workshop from a presentation by Brian Gilman to the architectural planning group for the NCI caBIG program. As you can see from the message I just sent to him (copy below), I would very much enjoy the opportunity to participate in the coming workshop.

I've attached a longish manuscript that outlines some issues that I think might be usefully considered in planning a semantic web for biology. In particular, I believe that life-science identifiers that will serve as primary keys to hold together distributed heterogeneous databases in a loosely coupled federation must possess a fair amount of subtlety if they are to match the subtlety that attends the various different concepts of identity in biology.

Thanks for considering me.

Robert J. Robbins, PhD
VP / IT
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Seattle, WA  98109

(206) 667-4778 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Robert J. Robbins 
To: gilmanb@pantherinformatics.com ; gilmanb@jforge.net 
Cc: Robbins Robert 
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 11:29 PM
Subject: W3C Workshop


Brian,

This is Bob Robbins. I was a participant in the caBIG conference call where you discussed LSIDs. You mentioned the coming W3C workshop on a semantic web for the life sciences.

I've had a chance to look at the web site and it looks like an interesting meeting. I suspect that my past experience as database program officer at NSF as well as directpor of the informatics core for the genome database might give me some insights that could be useful to the group. I'm certain I would learn a lot by participating.

The deadline for submitting a position paper is today and the format of the paper is (more or less) a 1-5 page tech summary of current ideas and/or work. Given my current role, I'm not really in a position to produce that kind of tech report on current activities, but I probably could distill some approximation of such a paper out of the attached much longer document.

Let me know if you think it might be possible for me to attend even though I will miss the formal deadline for the short tech paper. If I could, that would be great. If not, well I'll understand. But I'll be disappointed anyway.

Bob

Robert J. Robbins, PhD
VP / IT
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Seattle, WA  98109

(206) 667-4778