probably best not to mention Zwarte Piet then :) - Neil Saunders
no, some people might get slightly offended by that :) - Lars Juhl Jensen
He's supposed to have been just a Turkish orphan for what I understand - Jan Aerts
I have not really tried yet... but yesterday our landlord warned us about a black man on the roof tomorrow (5th!) that would clean our fireplace! hahahaha :) - Egon Willighagen
RDF? Seriously... using BIBO or so, every author is identified by a unique ID... it's not only an open alternative, distributed too! - Egon Willighagen
The problem would be to give a unique ID to any author... - Pierre
If there is anything that's easy to use and understand (including by non-tech-savvy scientists): what can we do to get that train rolling? What actions can we take? - Jan Aerts
@Jan ask the NCBI to give a unique ID to the authors in pubmed (dream... dream...), create a FOAF/BIBO central server where you could register your foaf profile, create tool building foaf profiles (I already started something like this here http://plindenbaum.blogspot.co... ), .... - Pierre
My gut is telling me that having this distributed is going to be very important, based on the way ISI(and tangentially Fair Isaac, for Americans) can jerk people around. How dangerous would it be to have something essential and worldwide managed by a central authority, no matter how (currently) benevolent? - Mr. Gunn
Nice. While I like and appreicate good visualizations, there are too many cases (networks are my current bug bea), where it seems that the goal is just to make pretty pictures. In those cases, it has seemed to me that unless I know what I'm looking for, the visualization is worse than a summary (for practical purposes). Of course a combination of vis and summary is ideal. - Rajarshi Guha
Man, great thinking for a very often occuring problem ! - joergkurtwegner
I'm not sure how much Processing can help with ad hoc data visualization. There is still a learning and programmatic curve, albeit smaller. How can you easily load the data and provide a graphical UI to it? I played around with Spotfire a few years ago, which can readily transform any tabular data into particle plots and other agnostic yet intuitive visualizations. But Spotfire is super-expensive. Google and NYTimes are taking steps towards providing open visualization APIs. - Shiran Pasternak
I agree, I quickly looked into 'processing', and for my daily work I could not imagine to work without SpotFire, but I can ignore 'processing'. Beside, the interface in 'processing' seems not practical and flexible enough for scientific data ? - joergkurtwegner
@Shiran: "not sure how much Processing can help with ad hoc visualization". That's _exactly_ what I use it for. The scripts are often so small that they are merely "sketches" (in Processing-lingo). Even though a tool like Spotfire is very useful, it falls short when your data contains many types of information. For example: clone read pairs mapped on a genome: there are the actual mappings, whether or not they map where they should, quality values, inversions, ... Any visualization has to be custom. - Jan Aerts
In that case, do you have any example scripts you can share? I didn't mean to rag on Processing. It's a great tool (especially coming from a Java and OpenGL background), and the applications out there that use it are fascinating. - Shiran Pasternak
Jan I'd also be interested in some examples. The one and only processing sketch I've attempted is http://tinyurl.com/5r7543 to demonstrate a simple algorithm. When visualizing data I tend towards plots and molecular graphics. There's also ruby-processing http://github.com/jashkenas/ru... which you might find easier as a ruby programmer. - Adam Kraut
@Shiran, Adam: As they're sketches of current work, am not allowed to put them online. But I will probably generalize one of my current visualizations and put it on github. Will let you know when that has happened. My very first hack was a proof-of-concept for comparative map viewer (http://tinyurl.com/5gkt85). - Jan Aerts
It is so cool to see Processing used to display scientific data! It can really lead to wider usage of advanced open source data vis libraries and APIs, that includes Google, NYT, and others. Check out the Javascript Processing.js which nicely expands the cross platform compatibility. If you get a chance to put more examples on github it would be appreciated, looking forward to seeing what else you are working on =) - Mike Chelen
