Kevin Ashley’s (DCC director) closing remark at the IDCC (International Digital Curation Conference) 2024 meeting was “ Reflect, Enjoy, Do something! ”. Hopefully you will enjoy my doing something.

[From algorithms to the bench]{style=“color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”} [Text-mining holds the promise of helping researchers to overcome information overload. It is a familiar premise: an avalanche of scientific knowledge is being produced and shared.

[Manual curation is vital for maintaining quality information in biological databases. However, with the exponential growth in biological data this approach is both challenging and time consuming. We wanted to create a scalable and sustainable process which could complement manual curation.  ]{style=“color: #494949; font-family: "open sans" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;”}[ ]{style=“color: #494949;

David Schindel and colleagues recently published a paper in the Biodiversity Data Journal : The paper is a call for the community to help grow a database (GRBio) on biodiversity repositories, a database that will "will require community input and curation". Reading this, I'm struck by the lack of a clear sense of what that community might be. In particular: who is this database for, and who is most likely to build it? I suspect that

We are pleased to announce a new feature in Europe PMC that allows you to track data citations in the scientific literature. It is now possible to search for papers that cite database records for several core life science databases, such as the European Nucleotide Archive, ArrayExpress, and PDBe, as well as dataset DOIs used by, for example, Figshare and Dryad.

Of the of the many issues needing addressing in this era of the so-called “data deluge” (apologies genomics bingo), on top of the well documented difficulties in computing power, bandwidth and storage keeping pace with data production, less attention has been paid on the efforts required to present and package this biological information to users.

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I spent today at an interesting meeting at Talis headquarters where there was a wide range of talks. Most of the talks were liveblogged by Andy Powell and also by Owen Stephens (who has written a much more comprehensive summary of Andy’s talk) and there will no doubt be some slides and video available on the web in future. The programme is also available.