June 19, 2009

Nettab 2009 Day Three: Semantic Integration



    1. Alzheimer’s Disease
    2. Huntington’s Disease
    3. Nicotine Addiction
    4. Schizophrenia
    5. Bipolar Disorder
    6. Autism
    7. Parkinson’s Disease
    8. ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
    9. Neuropathic Pain
    10. Major Depressive Disorder
    11. Cancer (multiple forms)


    1. Highly complex disorders
    2. Much information, incomplete understanding
    3. Inadequate treatment options
    4. Huge cost in human suffering
    5. Multi-factorial causality






June 15, 2009

Nettab 2009 Day One: Bio-wikis (and football)





  1. Giampaolo Bella
  2. Luca Bortolussi
  3. Leandro Ciuffo
  4. Alfredo Ferro
  5. Rosalba Giugno
  6. Alessandro Lagana
  7. Stefania Parodi
  8. Alfredo Pulvirenti
  9. Paolo Romano
  10. Elda Rossi
  11. Andrea Splendiani





May 21, 2009

Upcoming Gig: The Italian Job at NETTAB

NETTAB: Network Tools and Applications in BiologyNetwork Tools and Applications in Biology (NETTAB) is a series of workshops in Bioinformatics. It focuses on the most promising and innovative ICT tools and their utility in Bioinformatics. These workshops aim to introduce participants to the evolving network standards and technologies that are being applied to the field of biology.

Since 2001, the NETTAB workshops have being doing a Giro d’Italia or  Grand Tour of Italy; Genova, Bologna, Naples, Sardinia, Lake Como and Pisa have all played host to the workshop. This year, NETTAB 2009 is in Catania at the Università degli Studi di Catania in Sicily close to Mount Etna.

There is special theme for this years workshop, held on June 10-13, on Technologies, Tools and Applications for Collaborative and Social Bioinformatics Research and Development. So I’m very pleased that Paolo Romano asked me to do a keynote presentation (w00t!) on the work we have been doing in the REFINE project and myExperiment. Grazie Paolo, grazie. And thanks Carole Goble too for the recommendation.

If you’re going to NETTAB this year, see you there. If you’d like to come, today is the last day for the early bird discount, sign up at the registration page. The scientific programme looks interesting, it will be good to meet Alex Bateman and Tim Clark and the rest of this years speakers.

Now, if my keynote presentation is going to (as Michael Caine once famously said [1]) “blow the bl**dy doors off” [2], it needs loads more work. So I’d better get back to it. Ciao!

[Update: See reports from day one, day two and day three of NETTAB 2009.]


  1. Peter Collinson and Troy Kennedy-Martin (1969) The Italian Job
  2. Michael Caine (1969) “You’re only supposed to blow the bl**dy doors off!”
  3. Cannata, N., Schröder, M., Marangoni, R., & Romano, P. (2008). A Semantic Web for bioinformatics: goals, tools, systems, applications BMC Bioinformatics, 9 (Suppl 4) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-9-S4-S1

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