The Ontogenesis knowledgeblog meeting has now finished; it’s been a fascinating experience and one that I’ve enjoyed very much.

I was hoping for two things out of the meeting; the first was to get some content. There has been a pressing need introductory material on ontologies for a long time now. We were never going to address this completely in a two day meeting even with the significant number of people that we had in the room. But, we managed to write quite a number of articles between us — I rather let the side-down with only one small article, but I have the excuse that I was busy answering questions. Most of these have not achieved the required number of reviews yet, although I’ve just done the second reviews for Mikel’s, so once that’s posted, we should be there for at least one article. I think that people enjoyed the process enough that some more articles will appear over time, although, inevitably, once the immediacy of being in the same room will mean that this process will not happen as rapidly.

The second question was to get a clear understanding of whether the idea of knowledgeblogging has legs; it seems reasonable in theory, but does it work in practice. There were some issues — the server crashing twice out of memory was not ideal, although quickly resolved. Quite a number of people who hadn’t blogged before found the wordpress interface, particularly the editor, fairly nasty; it’s not really designed for large posts. The review process also was a little clunky and there were many questions and ideas about this. However, for my money, the 80/20 rules comes in; we got 80 percent there with a more-or-less modified wordpress. Well, maybe, 70/30.

The rest is going to require more thinking about.