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OMII-UK’s OSCAR Workshop brings chemists together

OSCAR is a toolkit for chemical computational linguistics, chemical named entity recognition, and extraction and validation of experimental measurements from the text of journal articles.

OMII-UK and the OSCAR project (at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics) recently hosted a successful workshop in Cambridge to introduce researchers to the latest development of the OSCAR software, which was performed by the Engage project. Attendees included current and new users from the Royal Society of Chemistry, European Bioinformatics Institute, and IDBS, who discussed their requirements for OSCAR and a roadmap for development, which will be used as the basis for a new version of the software.

www.tinyurl.com/nn2hcs

New videos show e-Research in action

A series of videos has been produced by the eIUS project to highlight the use of e-infrastructure in a wide range of disciplines, such as archaeology, bioinformatics, Nanoelectronics, Astronomy and Earth Sciences.

The Bioinformatics video discusses the application of Taverna for Trypanosomiasis research, and the sharing of workflows on myExperiment. The video includes appearances from OMII-UK Principle Investigators, Carole Goble and David De Roure, Professor of Bioinformatics, Andrew Brass, and Taverna user, Paul Fisher.

OMII-UK’s work with UCL’s organic crystal chemistry group is featured in a second video. This work has allowed the group to look at more of the molecules that the pharmaceutical industry are interested in investigating.

www.tinyurl.com/l5ffob

www.tinyurl.com/ltzj6u

Diaser solves archiving problems

Backing up the information stored on a network is an absolute necessity, but it leads to a difficult problem. The long-term storage and organisation of back ups – a process known as archiving – is time-consuming, prone to mistakes and expensive. Diaser is new software, distributed by OMII-UK, that provides a solution to these archiving problems.

Typically, back-up files are stored on a tape archival system, which requires a lot of space and labour to maintain. Diaser automates the archival process. It also copies the archive over three nodes, providing multiple redundancy to ensure data safety.

The current beta release of Diaser provides all of the main functions needed for the archival process. Future releases will provide extra functionality such as report generation, a retrieval client and an archival-space calculator.

www.tinyurl.com/m9h2nz

NGS Innovation Forum is magic!

Following on from last year's successful event, the NGS Innovation Forum is going one better with an event hosted in the wonderful location of the Magic Circle Headquarters, London on 21-22 October.

The two-day event will showcase the impact that the NGS has had on research in the UK, allow delegates to find out more about using the NGS in applied research, enable IT staff to find out how their institution can benefit from the NGS, and how you can contribute to and influence the future development of the NGS.

www.tinyurl.com/kvqpun

From strength to strength: GridSAM

GridSAM (OMII-UK’s job-submission service) has gone from strength to strength this year. There have been several releases with the addition of many new features and refinements, and a new major release is due very soon. Many of the changes have arisen directly from work with Professor Sally Price's Computational Chemistry Group at UCL, as part of the JISC funded ENGAGE project (see the New videos... article on this page). More recently, GridSAM has been deployed for projects at the Irish Centre for High End Computing and the Bergen Centre for Computational Science, Norway.

GridSAM is maintained by OMII-UK along with their partners. It is available from SourceForge and supported by OMII-UK.

www.tinyurl.com/mq462v

Twitter!

Do you want to keep up to date with the latest developments at OMII-UK? Do you want the latest e-Research news as soon as it’s reported? Then follow OMII-UK on Twitter.

www.twitter.com/omiiuk