Presentations by group members at external events

This paper analyses strategies for research data with a particular emphasis on meeting researchers’ requirements. It identifies a need for innovation, categorises classes of research data and analyses the commonalities and differences in the provisions for researchers in each category. This analysis will identify research, investment and policy opportunities that should economically improve researcher satisfaction and productivity. The paper is being developed incrementally.

We explain how e-Science is essential to providing the context in terms of methods, tools and infrastructure for the development of a virtual fly brain. We show examples of steering computational processes, managing knowledge in the spatial context of an organism and formulation of models in developmental biology.

Motivation: Scientific web portals are seen as the way forward to improve upon the slow uptake in use of utility computing infrastructure and high-performance computing facilities. Currently, two types of portals exist: general-purpose portals and domain-specific portals. The first type closely resembles the underlying technical infrastructure of compute-job submission systems, thereby providing little appeal to a wide range of domain specialists. The second type is tailored to the application specifications and their end-users' requirements.

It is of high biomedical interest to identify gene interactions and networks that are associated with developmental and physiological functions in the mouse embryo. There are now large datasets with both spatial and ontological annotation of the spatio-temporal patterns of gene-expression that provide a powerful resource to discover potential mechanisms of embryo organisation. Ontological annotation of gene expression consists of labelling images with terms from the anatomy ontology for mouse development. Current annotation is made manually by domain experts.