This site now listed in Nature Blogs, and the reason behind my keyword choices

Last week when scanning through Friendfeed, someone mentioned Nature Blogs. A number of my friends and fellow friendfeeders (1,2,3,4,5,6,etc.) already have their blogs registered there. I took the plunge and submitted my request last week, and this site was accepted for inclusion in the list this week. You can find it listed under the bioinformatics category. In honor of that occasion, I've decided to post a summary of the tags I chose to mark this blog with on Nature Blogs, and the reasons for them. (The obvious one, bioinformatics, wasn't necessary as far as I could tell because that is the top-level category I've placed the site into.)

• data integration: It is the main focus of my research, and one of the biggest challenges facing bioinformatics and the life sciences in general. So many formats, so little time! Reconciling these using brute force, standardization, semantics, and sneakiness are what it's all about.
• ontologies: I like ontologies for many reasons, not the least their potential for reconciling the many different ways of defining and naming things in our lives. We need a common ground from which to perform successful integration and analysis, and I think a well-written ontology (or set of them) is a beautiful thing. They are a major tool in my research bag of tricks. Not only that, but I also help develop a community-driven ontology for describing life-science experiments (OBI).
• workshops: my method of remembering what goes on in workshops and conferences is to take notes, and I can be a pretty fast typist. I enjoy blogging on each lecture at such an event as they happen, and you'll notice a lot of workshop and conference posts on this site. They are mainly written while the speaker is speaking, with a minimum (if any) of later editing. However, if any speaker reads my notes and would like to suggest areas where I made a mistake, I am more than happy to make those sorts of changes. One of my favorite ways of blogging.
• systems biology: that's the field in which my bioinformatics research is applied, which makes it an immediately-applicable tag for this blog. But try to define it and, as with so many things in this world, you could get as many definitions as there are people. (Ok, perhaps a slight exaggeration for dramatic effect.) So, I'll not try to define it today, and just say that my posts often deal with work in this field.
• science outreach: My Mom is a teacher, my Dad was a teacher and remains working in Education. If it wasn't so much hard work, I'd consider it as a career myself. :) However, I do enjoy trying to pass on my enjoyment of and interest in the sciences. Some of my more recent posts talk about the work I'm doing with the Teacher Scientist Network. Outreach is just fantastic, especially when explaining science to kids, and it's something I like to talk about in this site, when the opportunity arises.
• standards: Perhaps it's because I spent years working at the EBI, where they provide databases and services in specific syntaxes. Perhaps it's just the way my personality is. Whatever the reason, I really enjoy working with data standards. I'm lucky enough to be directly involved with two at the moment (FuGE and OBI), and peripherally involved in other efforts such as SBO (by peripherally I mean that I've nagged them in the past about the whys and wheretofores of various aspects of their ontology) and MIGS (I was involved in the initial work on the checklist, and provided advice on FuGE). I'm a bit of a standards fiend, and try to remind myself that not everyone finds them as interesting (though everyone should at least find them relevant!).