This is a live blog from Neuroinformatics 2009.

Motivation, what is the common feature of a set of disorders. They are all complex disorders, which we don’t really understand.

Alzforum is a nice example of an early web community. Alzheimers forum. Works as an ongoing journal club, with curated discussions. Started off during the early days of the web.

Developed StemBook which is an online book, launched about a year ago. Discussion of stuff that is happening. pd online research, is another alzheimers website, using a toolkit that they have developed. Linking across these forums can be a problem; need some forms of shared terminology server. Science Collaboration Framework. Based around drupal, allows common collaborative tools for biomedicine, shared ontologies/vocabulary and so on.

How do you link between these communities? Issues of semantic annotation; how does this happen? Are systems which allow you to guess what an ontology is; building system which should work across lots of different content management faciltiies. This can bring lots of benefits, as the additional semantics allows you to work around synonyms etc.

Discourse ontologies. SALT — semantic annotation of latex.

Need to support a spectrum of different knowledge structures, theasurai and so on. Less complex == more tractable to biologists. Complex and formalised, tractable to computers.

Are now integration discourse ontology into myexperiment and others.

Using existing work on entity recognition and try and produce a provenance aware representation of these results.