Two Journal Special Issues: Big Data, and Semantic Mashups for Bioinformatics

Both of these special issues are worth a look, as some of the papers look pretty interesting. I'll spend a little time in a later post on any articles I find particularly relevant.

• Semantic Mashup of Biomedical Data Special Issue of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. This includes a review article by Carole Goble and Robert Stevens: State of the nation in data integration for bioinformatics
• Nature's Big Data Sepcial Issue. The article entitled "How do your data grow?" was one of the many articles in this issue that I enjoyed. It's interesting to note that these problems in management and curation of big data are only now getting special attention in Nature. When I worked at the EBI, it was common knowledge among the database curators that 1) it would be very difficult for them to find other work as curators if they left the EBI, and 2) the time and high skill level it takes to annotate and curate biological database entries means that it is very difficult to get high coverage in such databases. It's nice to finally see some recognition of all the work the biocurators do by a journal such as Nature. Finally, there are high-profile articles stating that curation begins at home, with the researcher, and that curation needs much more support from researcher-level all the way up to the level of the database curators.