SciLink Blog

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we added the ability for you to draw chemical structures in the “edit profile” section of the site and associate those structures with your blog. I am pleased to say that a fair number of users have been drawing structures and putting them into their profiles. One user, William Gunn took some time and drew a very large structure. Can you figure out what it is and why it’s funny? Take a look below:

What else can we say? We were updating/upgrading some hardware and software which caused us some pain. These things happen. But, we’re back up and running. We may have to go down again. We’ll let you know when we plan on that happening.  

We launched another version of SciLink today! Executive summary:

•  Address book import function a la Plaxo
• Add your blogs right into your profile
• Add chemical structures into your profile! 

I used to be part of W3C’s semantic web group for the life sciences. After a few months working with this fine group of folks and directly with semantic web luminaries, I decided that the complexity was simply not worth developer time and, more importantly, dollars. Here’s an except I found on Rich Apodaca’s website that I believe sums all this up quite nicely: 

EMANTIC KNIGHT: None shall pass without formally defining the ontological meta-semantic thingies of their domain something-or-others!

HACKER: What?

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: None shall pass without using all sorts of semantic meta-meta-meta-stuff that we will invent Real Soon Now!

HACKER: I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight, but I must get my work done on the Web. Stand aside!

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: None shall find anything on the Internet without semantic metadata!

HACKER: So be it!

HACKER and SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Aaah!, hiyaah!, etc.

[HACKER chops the SEMANTIC KNIGHT's first argument off by building efficent statistical/heuristic search engines]

HACKER: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: ’Tis but a scratch.

HACKER: A scratch? Your argument has been cut off!

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: No, it isn’t.

HACKER: Well, what’s that, then?

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: I’ve had worse. None shall have an effective syndication network without RDF Site Summaries!

[clang]

Hiyaah!

[clang]

Aaaaaaaah!

[HACKER chops the SEMANTIC KNIGHT's second argument off by building the blogs/RSS/Aggregators/Bloglines/etc. network ]

HACKER: Victory is mine!

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Have at you!

[kick]

HACKER: Eh. You are indeed brave, Sir Knight, but the fight is mine.

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Oh, had enough, eh?

HACKER: Look, you stupid &^%$# You’ve got no arguments left.

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Yes, I have.

HACKER: Look!

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Just a flesh wound.

[kick]

HACKER: Look, stop that.

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: You won’t be able to get machine-machine services without an ontology to formally describe all the relationships!

[kick]

HACKER: Right!

[whop]

[HACKER chops the SEMANTIC KNIGHT's third argument off by building SOAPy and RESTful services with only implicit semantic descriptions]

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Right. I’ll do you for that!

HACKER: You’ll what?

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Come here!

HACKER: What are you going to do, bleed on me?

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: I’m invincible!

HACKER: You’re a looney.

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: The SEMANTIC Knight always triumphs! Have at you! Come on, then. I have an battalion of KR theorists on my side!

[whop]

[HACKER chops the SEMANTIC KNIGHT's last argument off with an army of actual code writers]

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Oh? All right, we’ll call it a draw.

HACKER: Come on, folks, let’s go.

SEMANTIC KNIGHT: Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow ^&^%$s! Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!

-Michael Champion, xml-dev list