Matt Pearce writes:
I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year’s ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolr project, and I went along to speak to people at the poster session afterwards about what we are doing, and how other teams could get involved.
Unfortunately, I missed the first half of Holly Bik’s keynote (registration seemed to take forever, hindered by dubious wifi and a printer that refused to cooperate), which used the vintage Oregon Trail game as an great analogy for biologists getting into bioinformatics – there are many, frequently intimidating, options when choosing how to analyse data, and picking the right one can be scary (this is something that definitely applies to the areas we work in as well).
There was a new approach to the traditional Q&A session afterwards as well, with questions being submitted on cards around the room, and via a Twitter hashtag. This worked pretty well, although Twitter latency did slow things down a couple of times, and there were a few shouted-out questions from the floor, but certainly better than having volunteers with microphones trying to reach the questioner across rows of people.
The morning session was on Data Science, and while a number of the talks went over my head somewhat, it was interesting to see how tools like Hadoop are being used in Bioinformatics. It was good to see the spirit of collaboration in action too, with Sebastian Schoenherr’s talk about CloudGene, a project that came about following an earlier BOSC that implements a graphical front end for Hadoop. Tony’s talk about BioSolr went down well – the show of hands for people in the room using Lucene, Solr and/or Elasticsearch indicated around 75% there were using search engines in some form. This backs up our earlier experience at the EBI, where the first BioSolr workshop was attended by teams from all over the campus, using Lucene or Solr in various versions to store and search their data.
Crossing over with lunch was the poster session, where Tony and I spoke to people about BioSolr. The Jalview team seemed especially interested in potential cross-over with their project, and there was plenty of interest generally in how the various extensions we have worked on (X-Join, hierarchical faceting) could be fitted into other projects.
The afternoon session was on the subject of Standards and Interoperability, starting with a great talk from Michael Crusoe about the Common Workflow Language, which started life at the BOSC 2014 codefest. There were several talks about Galaxy, a cloud-based platform for sharing data analyses, linking many other tools to allow workflows to be reproduced. Bruno Vieira’s talk about BioNode was also very interesting, and I made notes to check out oSwitch when time is available.
I had to leave before the afternoon’s panel took place, but all in all it was a very interesting day learning how open source software is being used outside of the areas I usually work in.
