Marie Madden of the Galway Independent reports, “Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway are leading a multi-million euro European Union initiative aimed at government transparency and giving citizens a voice in creating policies. The project, entitled ‘Puzzled by Policy’ has now launched a new widget (http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu) that provides a fun way for users to find out about immigration policy and become actively involved in the immigration policy-making process. This unique widget encourages users to explore their opinions on various immigration topics, as well as enabling them to see how their views compare to those of policy-makers, NGOs, and other immigration stakeholders.” Read more

Code-N Technology reports, “In response to the life science industry’s cry for improved research technology, Code-N Technology, Inc. is announcing an early access program to its cloud-based software that empowers scientists to quickly discover new opportunities for drug candidates. Chemists looking to find ‘green fields’ of opportunity not yet claimed by their competition can access the Green Field Finder and perform concept-based searches that deliver results orders of magnitude faster than other commercial products.” Read more

Grace Rattue reports that, “Researchers in Europe have developed a new system which could help in the war on resistance to antibiotics” using ICT technology and a semantic interoperability framework. Rattue explains, “According to the World Health Organization, approximately 440,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis emerge each year, resulting in at least 150,000 deaths… Dr. Dirk Colaert, Chief Medical Officer at Agfa HealthCare in Belgium, said: ‘Clinically, antimicrobial resistance is a huge challenge. Pharmaceutical companies simply can’t come up with new antibiotics fast enough to counter the resistance of bacteria to existing antibiotics and medications. By definition, it’s a war that can’t be won by antibiotics alone.’ Antibiotic resistance occurs when strains of bacteria in the human body evolve and adapt to resist the treatment. The resistance is made worse by some factors, such as the improper use and abuse of antibiotics. Dr. Colaert explained ‘On top of new antibiotics, we need new tools to apply antibiotics more smartly’.” Read more

Vivien Marx of Nature.com reports, “In January, over 50 researchers from 30 academic and commercial organizations agreed on a standard for describing data sets. The BioSharing initiative, comprising both researchers and publishers, launched the Investigation-Study-Assay (ISA) Commons, which promises to streamline data sharing among different databases. Life scientists have thousands of databases, over 300 terminologies and more than 120 exchange formats at their disposal, says BioSharing co-founder Susanna-Assunta Sansone of the University of Oxford. In this era of collaborative big science, researchers only move forward by ‘walking together.’ Although increased data sharing is central to scientific progress and is attracting attention from many quarters, standards are only some of the stars that must align to make it possible.” Read more

Elsevier recently announced that the company “has added a new enhancement to SciVal Strata, a web-based performance evaluation tool that allows users to conduct highly customized performance assessments of research teams and individual researchers. The new functionality provides the capacity for objective assessment of a specific selection of a researcher’s work in addition to their complete publication output. This option is critical when selecting the most impactful papers to be submitted for various government or institutional assessments. In addition the enhanced functionality will prove useful to individuals applying for grants and showing funders the impact of the research they supported.” Read more

Researchers at the University of Texas – Pan American have found that HBase “has the edge in data management for next generation Internet and cloud computing users.” The article states, “An open-source, non-relational database written in Java that can scale to thousands of servers, HBase makes many features of Google’s proprietary, high-performance distributed storage system BigTable available to the programming community. It also features a fail-safe library that runs ‘on top of’ a server cluster — a global architecture that detects and handles failures at the local level before they spread.” Read more

A recent article asks the question, “What’s the link between open data and access to information?” The article states, “The lack of connection that exists between activists working in both communities… prevents realising the issue.  This civil servant was really interested in how this new evolution would affect the relationship between citizens and the State. The key connection, and it is not always explicit, between open data and access to information is placed in the so called duties of proactive transparency that Freedom of Information Laws impose on States and that actually mandate [the publishing of] certain categories of information proactively, in an easy and accessible way, so citizens can benefit from it.” Read more

According to a new article, “Purdue University Libraries is leading the development of a new, online resource that will help people locate research data on the Internet. The project is called Databib and will engage a community of librarians from around the world to collaborate in creating an online bibliography of data repositories that can be used by researchers, students, funding agencies, and other librarians to find appropriate places to access and share research data. The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a federal research agency, awarded a grant to support the project.” Read more

Researchers from the University at Buffalo are using linked data from Tropical Storm Irene to conduct a damage assessment “that could help hard-hit communities in New York plan for future disasters.” The article notes, “Through data analysis and modeling, the scientists will be able to categorize the flood in the context of historical disasters. The information the researchers produce could help planners create more accurate watershed models and flood maps to better protect communities and infrastructure along Schoharie Creek from a future disaster.” Read more

A new language, S3QL has been published for controlled semantic integration of life sciences data. According to the abstract, “The value and usefulness of data increases when it is explicitly interlinked with related data. This is the core principle of Linked Data. For life sciences researchers, harnessing the power of Linked Data to improve biological discovery is still challenged by a need to keep pace with rapidly evolving domains and requirements for collaboration and control as well as with the reference semantic web ontologies and standards.” Read more