gnat writes "Just a reminder that O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Technology Conference is shaping up to be a doozy. Lots of great speakers, and talks for people who are new to the field as well as seasoned practitioners. It's in Tucson, Jan 28-31, and speakers include people you'll recognize (Damian Conway and Lincoln Stein) and people you should (Leroy Hood and Ewan Birney).
Bioinformatics is the application of computing to biological problems. It's a booming industry, one of the few computing areas to remain hot in the economic slump. If you're new to the field, try Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills and Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics. (plug plug
I won't be able to attend the conf, but I'm still curious about a few things. Notably, is this an area in which SVG could be (or has been) made useful? Whenever I read something about biology, there always seems to be graphic displays of the data. SVG could rock for some of the pics I've seen so far.
Re:SVG
pudge on 2002-01-11T18:59:22
S V what?Re:SVG
darobin on 2002-01-11T19:15:56
Hehehe. Scalable Vector Graphics. The best thing that happened to vector graphics since Bézier. It's an extremely powerful way of creating graphics that can also be animated. A bit like Flash except that it actually makes sense and can be used for serious work. I've written about it a bit here and the web's full of information on it.
It's features are too numerous to be listed, but what is probably the most astounding part is that it's an XML based format. This means that one can embed endless metadata at all levels, and keep the internal representation of the graphic consistent with the structure of the data.
Re:SVG
kirwilliam on 2003-03-01T19:46:45
Well, i can let you know that me and a fellow bioinformaticist (yep, its the proper job title for a bioinformatics programmer) are really excited about the SVG perl module.
It took me a day and a half to create a karyotype / microarray expression viewer. The module is a little tricky to use as there's not much in the way of examples, it took us a good while to work out how to use filters, but it was well worth it.
Look forward to many new bioinformatics tools that will use SVG, at least coming from our lab.
--Nat
Re:SVG at biocon
darobin on 2002-01-14T14:51:44
Very much like that indeed! I already saw Pastel but I haven't had time to play with it (yet). The author is one of the most interesting people on the svg-dev list (but that really doesn't say much).
I have little knowledge of the requirements that biotech has, only a feeling that SVG could fit that spot very well (I've mostly used it for cartography and layered visualisation of various things so far). If you get a chance, please try to nudge that gentleman into publishing artciles, slides, etc on a website
:-) Re:SVG at biocon
gnat on 2002-01-14T21:53:44
Will do. Anyone else you want me to fertilize? Err.. :) --Nat
