Finally got back from All Hands. Could have done without the meeting really, as it’s left me very tight for the beginning of term and a BBSRC grant deadline. Was a good meeting though. There was an interesting talk on a ontology of units of measurement — perhaps not exciting but everyone needs it. Peter Buneman gave a talk on why annotation is hard. His conclusion — that you need a reliable identifier system — seems fair, although problematic; reliable identifers have been discussed before, but they require coordination and probably centralisation. While I don’t hold entirely with the "404 is a feature not a bug" argument, it is true that requiring this form of centralisation brings with it many disadvantages.

Ah, term start; bang goes any chance of sciece happening for the next few weeks.

Originally published on my old blog site.