William Waites

Open Bibliography for Science, Technology, and Medicine

The concept of Open Bibliography in science, technology and medicine (STM) is introduced as a combination of Open Source tools, Open specifications and Open bibliographic data. An Openly searchable and navigable network of bibliographic information and associated knowledge representations, a Bibliographic Knowledge Network, across all branches of Science, Technology and Medicine, has been designed and initiated. For this large scale endeavour, the engagement and cooperation of the multiple stakeholders in STM publishing - authors, librarians, publishers and administrators - is sought.

Annotation of rule-based models with formal semantics to enable creation, analysis, reuse and visualization.

Motivation: Biological systems are complex and challenging to model and therefore model reuse is highly desirable. To promote model reuse, models should include both information about the specifics of simulations and the underlying biology in the form of metadata. The availability of computationally tractable metadata is especially important for the effective automated interpretation and processing of models. Metadata are typically represented as machine-readable annotations which enhance programmatic access to information about models. Rule-based languages have emerged as a modelling framework to represent the complexity of biological systems. Annotation approaches have been widely used for reaction-based formalisms such as SBML. However, rule-based languages still lack a rich annotation framework to add semantic information, such as machine-readable descriptions, to the components of a model. Results: We present an annotation framework and guidelines for annotating rule-based models, encoded in the commonly used Kappa and BioNetGen languages. We adapt widely adopted annotation approaches to rule-based models. We initially propose a syntax to store machine-readable annotations and describe a mapping between rule-based modelling entities, such as agents and rules, and their annotations. We then describe an ontology to both annotate these models and capture the information contained therein, and demonstrate annotating these models using examples. Finally, we present a proof of concept tool for extracting annotations from a model that can be queried and analyzed in a uniform way. The uniform representation of the annotations can be used to facilitate the creation, analysis, reuse and visualization of rule-based models. Although examples are given, using specific implementations the proposed techniques can be applied to rule-based models in general. Availability and implementation: The annotation ontology for rule-based models can be found at http://purl.org/rbm/rbmo. The krdf tool and associated executable examples are available at http://purl.org/rbm/rbmo/krdf. Contact: anil.wipat@newcastle.ac.uk or vdanos@inf.ed.ac.uk

Organoid And Tissue Patterning Through Phase Separation: Use Of A Vertex Model To Relate Dynamics Of Patterning To Underlying Biophysical Parameters

Exactly a century ago, D’Arcy Thompson set an agenda for understanding tissue development in terms of underlying biophysical, mathematically-tractable mechanisms. One such mechanism, discovered by Steinberg in the 1960s, is adhesion-mediated sorting of cell mixtures into homotypic groups. Interest in this phase separation mechanism has recently surged, partly because of its use to create synthetic biological patterning mechanisms and partly because it has been found to drive events critical to the formation of organoids from stem cells, making the process relevant to biotechnology as well as to basic development. Here, we construct quantitative model of patterning by phase separation, informed by laboratory data, and use it to explore the relationship between degree of adhesive difference and speed, type and extent of resultant patterning. Our results can be used three ways; to predict the outcome of mix-ing cells with known properties, to estimate the properties required to make some designed organoid system, or to estimate underlying cellular properties from observed behaviour.

RemIX: A Distributed Internet Exchange for Remote and Rural Networks

The concept of the \ac{IXP}, an Ethernet fabric central to the structure of the global Internet, is largely absent from the development of community-driven collaborative network infrastructure. The reasons for this are two-fold. \acp{IXP} exist in central, typically urban, environments where strong network infrastructure ensures high levels of connectivity. Between rural and remote regions, where networks are separated by distance and terrain, no such infrastructure exists. In this paper we present RemIX a distributed \acp{IXP} architecture designed for the community network environment. We examine this praxis using an implementation in Scotland, with suggestions for future development and research.