like (I suspect) most of you, I've been getting lots of email about the upcoming Bioinformatics Conference. as a former scientist, this kind of thing interests me, and I've been trying to figure out some way to get into the informatics field lately. however, bio isn't my thing - I was a chemist.
that got me thinking. you know, there's more to informatics than bioinformatics - there's medical informatics, clinical informatics, cheminformatics, pharmainformatics (though some definitions may overlap). suddenly, my interests are being discriminated against in a major conference!
;)
is anybody in perl-land using perl for any of these other fields? is bioperl the only project that gets perl science geeks enthused?
maybe if there were some other things going on, the next Bioinformatics conference could just be the Informatics conference (much like how TPC became OSCon) and people interested in those other informatics fields (like me) would be more able to justify the expense of attending.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of cheminformatics involved in bioinformatics, but then I don't know enough to make a really educated guess here.
However the people behing CML (one of the first major XML vocabularies out there) are cheminformaticians, and there seems to be some amount of interest around their field. I've mostly seen that through the SVG prism (they use it for visualisation of that data), but there's probably a lot more so you might want to dig around CML.
The XML in there might be scary, but after hanging out so long on #axkit-dahut and doing some SOAP I'm certain you can laugh at it while it cowers away from you
