Today is the kick-off meeting for ONDEX. This is a new project which is doing something that I’ve wanted to do for ages; in a nutshell, it’s a large, graph-based datawarehouse. It’s rather similar to a proposal that I wrote with Mark Wilkinson from BioMOBY a few years back, with one important difference — the system actually exists, produced at Rothamstead over the last few years.

The new project involves integrating some other bits of technology — taverna, text mining and so on, and a couple of specific biological examples. I think it’s going to be a pretty cool project, and we should get some useful biology out of it.

Two things that I have learnt today: firstly, what "Ondex" actually stands for is not actually sure and, secondly, some varieties of willow are dodecaploid. Why would any plant need that many genomes?

Originally published on my old blog site.