I’m on my way down to Manchester for the Ontogenesis meeting while I was sad enough to blog about on Christmas Day. I’m looking forward to this meeting a lot; the idea has been in gestation for five or six months since Bio-Ontologies last year. In summary, we are getting a number of people together to write articles for a book, but instead of going through the tedious and difficult process of getting it published we are going to use a blog.

I finished fiddling with wordpress yesterday and, hopefully, all is ready (fingers crossed that our server doesn’t get hacked as happened to this blog a few days ago). I’m hoping that we manage to get a number of articles written during the meeting; in practice, getting people in one room is the best way of getting these things done. However, this is not a closed process; I’d welcome articles from anyone, as well as those not at the meeting. Being blog based, the system is inherently distributed. So, if you have an ontology-related topic that you have a burning desire to write about, please contact me and I’ll let you know whether if anyone else is doing it. Alternatively, there is a list of topics that we hope to make a start in covering. The articles will be peer-reviewed and available for the world to see, fully-credited to your name.

I can’t guarantee that it’s going to be included in the REF, but I am working on it.