Following on from the post yesterday I actually went along to the workshop with the title I didn’t understand. There was much I didn’t understand and a lot of technical terminology that went straight over my head. Terminology is an issue here, particularly where there is a desire to bring in new people. There is an argument that if I’m coming to this meeting it is incumbent on me to figure out the technical terms but if one of the themes of this meeting is expanding the reach of e-science to the ‘general science public’ then using terminology that could be simplified but still maintain a precise (enough) meaning then that is helpful.

It turns out that OMII-UK stands for Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute and that they are involved in sorting out and integrating software tools that are available or should be available and providing a central body that can look after people using these systems. Some of these are of potential use to interlink with our e-lab notebook, particularly Taverna and myExperiment, and I will be aiming to talk to the people involved about connecting these things up over the course of the meeting.