eric.jain.name 

While looking for a birthday and farewell (I was just leaving the Swiss-Prot group) present for Amos Bairoch, I came across a company that creates custom action figures. Here’s the result!

One year after the amazing and memorable conference that was held at the 20th anniversary of Swiss-Prot we’ve made all the talks available on Google Video. Here’s a starting point. I heard it’s going to be a rainy weekend ;-)

Just got back from the ISMB conference in Vienna. Turned out to be a quite busy conference — I barely managed to attend any talks :-)

In the latest effort to make myself obsolete by the end of this year, we are looking for a software developer to help us better make our data available to both humans and machines. The main responsibilities of this position will be the further development of the UniProt web site and the UniProt RDF distribution.

Gave a brief talk about programmatic access to beta.uniprot.org at the EMBRACE workshop in Geneva today.

The UniProt RDF distribution is over 5GB large. To help people retrieve the data more efficiently, we now mirror the data and provide a Metalink file that describes all the file locations.

The Google Gadgets API can be used to create small applications that people can add to their personalized Google home page. Here is a simple “gadget” for blasting protein sequences.

Google now allows you to create custom search engines. I used this to set up a search engine that searches in well know life sciences sites.

Google Subscribed Links provide a mechanism for adding information at the top of a Google search results page. I set up an example that can be used to see information from the Enzyme Nomenclature Database when searching for something like EC 1.2.3.4.

According to this paper the most influential criteria engineers and scientists use for selecting information resources are not quality or even familiarity but 1. the time it takes to track down information and 2. the authoritativeness of the resource. Perhaps this explains why researchers are increasingly using Google Scholar rather than PubMed (PubMed is more authoritative, but Google’s ranked results allow you to find publications faster) and why the NCBI still receives more requests for protein-related data than we do (both sites are equally bad at searching, but NCBI may be seen as more authoritative).