The third day of the Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences (SWAT4LS) meeting and workshop in Berlin on December 11th, was completely dedicated to a hackathon organized at the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB), Computer Science Campus, Freie University Berlin.

We joined with four people from ONTOFORCE to meet like-minded semantic web and linked open data people, to taste what’s going on in the field and to seek for help for our ‘challenge’.  We’re looking for solutions to deal with the author issues in PubMed abstracts. Author names in scientific publications are in most cases difficult to link to physical persons due to ambiguities with namesakes, inconsistent usage of middle name initials, missing data etc. 

After introducing the challenge with some real life examples, some participants got their teeth into it. We suggested to start with known person-publication links provided by physical persons and gathered by the ORCiD.org initiative. At the end of the day, three interesting proposals were presented and the audience voted for James Malone’s idea as the best proposal. He was awarded an iPad mini for his efforts. The runner-up proposal by Robert Hoehndorf received only one vote less.

Below some pictures of the participants presenting their solutions.

Hans Constandt, our CEO, decided to extend the challenge till the end of December 2014 to allow others to participate. We will offer another iPad mini if more elaborated and improved suggestions are committed in our open github repository by Tuesday Dec 30th 17:00 CET. Pls share the message to get more people involved if interested.

We’re awaiting the final results and will dive into the implementation of the proposals in our DISQOVER product.

Thanks for all the proposals and thanks to the SWAT4LS organizers, Filip, Andra, Ewout & Hans