Ammar is finishing up his PhD thesis with his research on the use of FAIR towards predictive toxicology. Or, “AI ready”, as the term FAIR is now sometimes explained. Any computational method needs good data, and just FAIR is not enough. It needs to meet community standards, as formalized in R1.3. To me, this includes meeting community standards like minimal reporting standards.

This paper got published in July already, but I had not had the time yet to blog about this exciting work by Irini Furxhi and Ammar Ammar: A data reusability assessment in the nanosafety domain based on the NSDRA framework followed by an exploratory quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR) modeling targeting cellular viability (doi:10.1016/j.impact.2023.100475) The study has two sides to it: first, it looks into how far we

The Bioclipse Workshop has ended and, for just three days, turned out quite productive. We have first bits of scripting support for JavaScript using Rhino. At this moment the scripting plugin needs to explicit depend on plugins to be able to access their classpath, but we plan to solve that. An example script: // to have short identifiers Array = Packages.java.lang.reflect.Array; String = Packages.java.lang.String;

With chemometrics in mind (QSAR, data mining, …), I have started working on matrix support in Bioclipse, because the matrix is the important step between (bio-)molecular content and statistical analysis. I implemented this such that the actual matrix implementation can be freely chosen, that is, bc_statistical provides a IMatrixImplementation extension point.

Recent Developments of the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) - An Open-Source Java Library for Chemo- and Bioinformatics (green OA) discusses (reasonably) recent additions to the CDK. It appeared in issue 17 of this years Current Pharmaceutical Design volume, after being too long in the queue after being accepted; but I am happy that it is out now.

As of April 3, I will be working as postdoc in the group of Christoph Steinbeck at the Cologne University BioInformatics Center, or simply CUBIC, for a year. Though no exact plans have been decided upon, the work will include CDK, CML, ontologies, Bioclipse, semantic web technologies, Jmol, and other interesting things. Research areas will at least include QSAR, but I hope to touch bits of bioinformatics too.

For the past few weeks I have been working on a review article, which will contain a section with new QSAR/QSPR descriptors published in the period 2000-now.